skills.rest
idankidankCommunity·4 Agent Skills Included

explainshell

Explain any shell command by matching flags to man page help text

Parses man pages and explains command-line arguments by matching each flag to its exact help text. Eliminates the need to dig through dense man pages or guess what unfamiliar shell flags actually do. Uses LLM-powered extraction and a bash AST matcher to break down complex piped commands into plain explanations. Ships with a web interface, a CLI manager, and evaluation tools for testing extraction quality.
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npx skills add idank/explainshell --all -g -y
Available:

Instructs the AI agent on the project's test, lint, and formatting workflow, including mandatory virtualenv activation and how to run LLM extraction evaluations before committing changes.

All Skills in This Repository (4)

Pure Emerald Level Indicators
📦 In Repo
idankidank

mandoc-fix

Orchestrate mandoc -T markdown bug diagnosis, fix, and validation workflows.

Community
Advanced
📦 In Repo
idankidank

eval-llm

Evaluate LLM extraction pipeline changes against a baseline and produce merge, regression, or defer verdicts.

Community
Advanced
📦 In Repo
idankidank

eval-render

Compare patched mandoc binary renders against the mandoc-md baseline and produce diff reports.

Community
Advanced
📦 In Repo
idankidank

my-plan

Drafts, dual-reviews, and commits design plan documents under plans/ for the explainshell repository.

Community
Intermediate

Frequently Asked Questions

FAQPage Schema
How to install explainshell?▼

Run `npx skills add idank/explainshell --all -g -y` in your terminal to install all skills in this suite globally.

What does explainshell do?▼

It takes any shell command and explains each argument by matching it to the relevant help text extracted from the program's man page.

How does explainshell explain complex piped commands?▼

It parses the command into an AST with bashlex, walks each command and shell operator node, and matches every token to known options from its man page database.

Can explainshell use AI to extract man page options?▼

Yes. Its extraction pipeline can send man page text to OpenAI, Gemini, or Azure models, and the LLM returns line ranges so the help text always comes from the original source.

Do I need coding experience to use explainshell?▼

No. You can simply paste a shell command into the web interface and read the plain-English explanation of each flag.

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