Explain, from your shell

A few weeks ago, almost everyone on Twitter was sharing Explain Shell - with good reason. It's an awesome site that you can copy and paste a command into and it'll explain each component of it to you.

There are a few examples on the homepage, I particularly like tar xzvf archive.tar.gz and ssh -i keyfile -f -N -L 1234:www.google.com:80 host.

Now, whilst you can copy and paste a command you're working on into the site, wouldn't it be awesome if you could trigger it from your command line? Thanks to Schneems, you can!. I prefer the shell version, so add the following to your .bashrc (or .zshrc etc) and then next time you want to see what a command does, just add explain to the beginning of it.

bash
function explain {
  # base url with first command already injected
  # $ explain tar
  #   => http://explainshel.com/explain/tar?args=
  url="http://explainshell.com/explain/$1?args="
  # removes $1 (tar) from arguments ($@)
  shift;
  # iterates over remaining args and adds builds the rest of the url
  for i in "$@"; do
    url=$url"$i"+"
  done
  # opens url in browser
  open $url
}