Shell.how: Explain Shell Commands

There's also https://explainshell.com!

Will you consider switching the backend provider?

https://fig.io/blog/post/fig-is-sunsetting

The parser needs work; it thinks "${DEBUG:-0}" is not valid shell.

(explainshell.com is only slightly better; it doesn't explain the parameter expansion, which would be very useful as there's 30 different kinds of expansion. see https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Shell-Exp...)

I tried

    tar xvzf 1.zip

    xvzf: is neither a valid subcommand, option, or argument.

Wow, fig looks so cool. Shame it's shutting down. I don't see a clear explanation for how Amazon Q replaces it.

Local first, from the command line using llamafile version 0.2.1

    Explain the shell command: git commit -m "hello world"

In this specific command: - `git commit` is the shell command itself. - `-m` option is used to specify a message for the commit. This message provides context and information about the changes that were made in the commit. - `"hello world"` is the argument provided for the `-m` option, it's a simple string that serves as the commit message.

So, this command will create a new Git commit with the message "hello world".

Doesn't sound very useful to me. I tried entering something like this:

     sed 's/y/i/g' <<<'xxyyzz'

I am honestly asking and not trying to be a smartass:

What are the advantages of LLM summaries over man pages/google searches/stackoverflow threads?

I could maybe empathize if an engineer only had 30 seconds to understand a code snippet or a large shell command, but how often is that really the case? Is the time gained worth the risk of hallucination or incompleteness?

Or perhaps engineers are not the target audience?

Pretty cool, though seems very similar to explainshell.com.

Also noticed that it breaks with single quotes, for example, this works:

    curl -H "Some-Header: value" http://example.com

    curl -H 'Some-Header: value' http://example.com

How’s this different from explainshell?

Cool site, although I found my own bug too

https://files.catbox.moe/j08300.png

If you check the git commit example on the homepage, it for some reason describes the git command as "The stupid content tracker"

Alternatively pipx install llm

explain() { # Use llm to generate a simple explanation for a command. # Example: explain 'fortune | cowsay' local system_prompt="Be brief. Mention only serious errors, if any, otherwise just explain the code." local query="$1" llm "$query" --system "$system_prompt" "${@:2}" }

explain 'fortune | cowsay'

This command combines two fun Unix/Linux utilities:

1. `fortune`: This program generates a random quote or short message, often humorous or thought-provoking.

2. `cowsay`: This is a program that generates ASCII art of a cow (or other character) with a speech bubble containing a message.

The pipe (`|`) between them takes the output of `fortune` and feeds it as input to `cowsay`.

So when you run this command, you'll see an ASCII art cow "saying" a random fortune message. It's a playful way to display random quotes or messages in the terminal.

Example output might look like:

_________________________________________ / Q: How many Marxists does it take to \ | screw in a light bulb? A: None: The | \ light bulb contains the seeds of its / \ own revolution. / --------------------------------------- \ ^__^ \ (oo)\_______ (__)\ )\/\ ||----w | || ||

`git blame -C -C -C` does not give a proper description

One of these for awk scripts would be amazing.

fig is dead: https://fig.io/