I find myself, every now and then, staring at a really long command, trying to figure it out. Here’s a good example:
ssh user@remote "tar czpf - /path/on/remote" | tar xzpf - -C /path/on/local |
If you get the gist, but don’t remember all the knobs by heart, don’t worry. none of us do. that’s what man pages are for!
explainshell greatly simplifies things - It give you an easy, readable, visual representation of the command (click to open):
explainshell currently contains 29761 parsed manpages from sections 1 and 8 found in Ubuntu’s manpage repository. According to its author, Idan Kamara, A lot of heuristics were used to extract the arguments of each program, and there are errors here and there, especially in manpages that have a non-standard layout.
The project is available on GitHub and licensed under GNU GPLv3.