How to get an explanation of a Linux terminal command.
Additional information on Explainshell.com.
A few days ago I found a very interesting website by chance and that can be of help to many users who start working with the Linux terminal or shell. It is a website that allows us to
obtain an explanation of a Linux terminal command
. In this way we can
know what a command does
from a tutorial and even learn new commands.
The web is called
http://explainshell.com/
and not only will it help us find out what the commands do, but we can also check the help pages of each command. In other words, the web uses the help information that the
man
command returns to document the different commands.
How to get an explanation of a Linux terminal command.
To obtain the explanation of a command, the process is as simple as pasting it in the text box and pressing the
«Explain»
button. Then we will see a tree list in which we can see what the command does and what the different options are for.
At the end of the page it always indicates the source of the help page of the command, which we can access by clicking on the name of the command.
The web recognizes many commands, since it is based on the Ubuntu man pages.
It is an ideal tool for new and advanced users because it allows us to
examine the different parts of a command
and understand it.
It is a tool that I recommend to always have on hand, especially when we find an unknown command that we do not know what it does.
Additional information on Explainshell.com.
To finish some informative data to know more about this project. It is an open source project, which we can consult its source code on
GitHub
.
It uses Python as a programming language
and makes use of bashlex libraries to analyze the commands and recognize their different parts. This bashlex library has been developed specifically for this project by the same developer responsible for maintaining Explainshell.