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Comment on Explaining Shell Commands in the Shell (2014)

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So it's like a command line version of http://explainshell.com/ ...

And it seems like your site / API backend is not open source. Do you plan to make an offline version?

japOP

I don't plan to make a version that gets its data from local man pages, but it would be great if such a tool existed.

Parsing the data out of man pages is messy, and my process currently involves a lot of steps. I actually only started collecting the data for this as a side-effect of trying to make man pages render nicely in browsers.

I would like to open source more of the backend, but I've started with a tool I wrote to extract man pages from project repos: https://github.com/jacksonp/manlib

The fish shell has a man page parser that you may be interested in: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/blob/master/share/t...

japOP

Thanks, that does look interesting. Will give it a spin as soon as I get a chance and compare results.

Thanks for mentioning explainshell.com I occasionally run into commands I've not seen before and end up wading through man pages, this is way more terse.

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