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Explain Shell

explainshell.com

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Re: Explain Shell

#171

Post by pixelmonkey »

Really cool. A suggestion. For long explains, it'd be great to be able to click on the part to jump to that part of the explanation, and then offer some way to "jump back to top".

Alternatively, I was thinking there might be a nice "swipe" or "carousel" interface applicable here. e.g. you hit left/right arrows and it explains every individual atom of the command-line.

That said, very nice as it is now. You deserve major kudos simply for bringing most manpages online in a searchable, good-looking interface! Instantly added as a "dev" bookmark for me.

Re: Explain Shell

#172

Post by robryk »

idank wrote: post #86
brandall10 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I love this. I bookmarked it and plan to use this often. Possible additions: - Something that users of the service could add commands to and the community could up vote for grading on technical difficulty. - Also a "shell command of the day" type of mailer service would be amazing :)

I can scan the access logs for the top explained commands, and show those on the home page (although that will probably only further increase their popularity ;).

You can also count how often they are requested from the links on the home page. Granted, the additional popularity will probably cause people to share those more often.

Re: Explain Shell

#174

Post by girvo »

jff wrote: post #121
girvo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long does it take you to type a character???

Assume I type 80 wpm A word is standardized as 5 keystrokes 80 wpm is therefore 400 keystrokes per minute. Divide by 60 to get about 6.6 keystrokes per second, or about 0.15 seconds per keystroke. Therefore it would take about 0.6 seconds to type the four extra characters, giving a net savings to use du+grep instead. And 80 wpm is probably a rather fast estimate; I'd guess that I type slower when I'm writing commands…

I must've read it wrong, or you fixed it, 'cause I read it as 25 seconds, hence my question! :)

Re: Explain Shell

#178

Post by etrain »

un1xl0ser wrote: post #132
etrain wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool - but support for xargs seems to be broken. find . -type f | xargs wc -l http://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=find+.+-type+f+%7C+xargs...

I would expect xargs to stop processing arguments strictly after the first non-flag argument. Arguments to xargs do appear to be parsed, example below: http://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=find+%2F+-type+f+-print0...

Right, but in this example it's not telling me what the "grep" is doing. Admittedly xargs is a weird case where the arguments to the program are invoked as a program, but I'd say it shows pretty frequently in these type of "what does this long freaking command do?" situations. Maybe worth adding a special case for.
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