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I'll donate $100 if the author wants to build this and open source it. [Ed: As a shell application locally] A new "explain" command could help me, my team, and
by jph 13y ago
I'll donate $100 if the author wants to build this and open source it. [Ed: As a shell application locally]
A new "explain" command could help me, my team, and save us an enormous amount of time getting up to speed on some of our org's long-term system maintenance scripts.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoHow about an API where you can POST your script with curl -X and a unique link is returned that explains the script when you hit it with a browser? #shutupandtakemymoney (DevOps is fun, teaching not always)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- skeletonjelly 13y agoI would never install this in this format. I'm not going to POST my bash history! I'd prefer a model where you download a definition file (if it needs to be "updated" at the start frequently)
- idank 13y agoThanks for the incentive, but it's not needed and if I do get around to it, it'll of course be open source. The main difficulty I had with writing a command line utility is figuring out the UI in a console. Suggestions are welcome of course. Also, there are two possibilities for a client: the first queries an API on explainshell.com by sending it a command line. This has the advantage of the client being thin, and using the centralized man page database which is probably more accurate. But this means that you're potentially not explaining the exact command you're running locally, which may be confusing. The second option is to run the man page parser, matcher, etc. locally against the man page on your machine.
- auton1 13y agoOne advantage of a local repository is that it is more likely to match the software versions on the local machine. However, perhaps the best thing would be to allow both local and remote queries :-)