Understanding Shell Commands Easily Using “Explain Shell” Script in Linux

While working on Linux platform all of us need help on shell commands, at some point of time. Although inbuilt help like man pages, whatis command is helpful, but man pages output are too lengthy and until and unless one has some experience with Linux, it is very difficult to get any help from massive man pages. The output of whatis command is rarely more than one line which is not sufficient for newbies.

Explain Shell Commands in Linux Shell

There are third-party application like ‘cheat‘, which we have covered here “Commandline Cheat Sheet for Linux Users. Although Cheat is an exceptionally good application which shows help on shell command even when computer is not connected to Internet, it shows help on predefined commands only.

There is a small piece of code written by Jackson which is able to explain shell commands within the bash shell very effectively and guess what the best part is you don’t need to install any third party package. He named the file containing this piece of code as 'explain.sh'.

Features of Explain Utility

1. Easy Code Embedding.
2. No third-party utility needed to be installed.
3. Output just enough information in course of explanation.
4. Requires internet connection to work.
5. Pure command-line utility.
6. Able to explain most of the shell commands in bash shell.
7. No root Account involvement required.

Prerequisite

The only requirement is 'curl' package. In most of the today’s latest Linux distributions, curl package comes pre-installed, if not you can install it using package manager as shown below.

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