I don't know what I was expecting, but one of my most-used command lines, "du -a | grep foo" is pretty uninformative.
Explain Shell
11–20 of 179 posts
Re: Explain Shell
#12Nice. Very nice.
Re: Explain Shell
#13Gorgeous. Amazing. Absolutely fantastic. Easy the coolest and most useful thing I've seen on hacker news in a while. Enough gushing, now some bug reports: "read -r random_line "nc HOST PORT | tee movie.mp4 | mplayer -" I can hover over movie.mp4, but I can't scroll down the see the description without losing the emphasis on that path. I'd suggest letting the user click on the portion, or perhaps a long-hover effect?
The first bug is acknowledged in the page: "support for (...) command substitutions will be added later on"
Re: Explain Shell
#14I give out this link to all my developers that are just getting a feel for the terminal. Thanks so much for this!
A nice to have: Having the command that was originally entered follow you down at the top of the window so when I'm looking at a long piped command, it makes it easier to follow
Re: Explain Shell
#15Very well done. Now I just wish this was a shell program! user@server:~$ explain iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -s ip-to-block -j DROP
This is a great idea!
Re: Explain Shell
#16I don't know what I was expecting, but one of my most-used command lines, "du -a | grep foo" is pretty uninformative.
Tried it. The explain read-out seemed reasonable. Care to elaborate how it wasn't informative?
Re: Explain Shell
#17Really cool project! I can already see myself using this a lot.
Re: Explain Shell
#18Very cool! It would be great if you would provide common usages for a given command if the user didn't provide any switches. That could be links like the ones you have in the "examples" section on the landing page.
Re: Explain Shell
#19Gorgeous. Amazing. Absolutely fantastic. Easy the coolest and most useful thing I've seen on hacker news in a while. Enough gushing, now some bug reports: "read -r random_line "nc HOST PORT | tee movie.mp4 | mplayer -" I can hover over movie.mp4, but I can't scroll down the see the description without losing the emphasis on that path. I'd suggest letting the user click on the portion, or perhaps a long-hover effect?
> I can hover over movie.mp4, but I can't scroll down the see the description without losing the emphasis on that path. I'd suggest letting the user click on the portion, or perhaps a long-hover effect?
What if the command was simply pinned to the top of the screen as you scroll down? This would require some trickiness to make the atoms remain connected to their documentation as the documentation slides under the command, but would allow you to view any documentation on the same screen as the command itself.
EDIT: On the other hand, I just noticed that there are buttons to only show the documentation for specific subcommands, so you can always use those to cycle until the documentation you want to see is visible.
Re: Explain Shell
#20I don't know what I was expecting, but one of my most-used command lines, "du -a | grep foo" is pretty uninformative.
Tried it. The explain read-out seemed reasonable. Care to elaborate how it wasn't informative?
The explanation for "du" and its -a flag make it sound like I'm trying to find out how much disk space my files are using. Fine, that's the usual usage, but the point here is that it lists out every file under the current directory.
The bigger problem is grep. We're told that grep prints lines matching a pattern, great. But then the explanation of the arguments makes it sound, to the uninitiated, like I'm giving "foo" as the filename, because the site doesn't include the actual grep syntax.
It doesn't really explain what the command line is doing. It does seem to do a decent job of telling someone who's already fluent in shell usage the specific meaning of all options given. That's actually pretty important these days where any given GNU util will have flags for every single letter of the alphabet in both upper and lower case.