Explain shell (opens in new tab)

The terminal was not built for that kind of automatic lookup, and I often find that options are only interesting in their contexts, so while it might in many cases be possible to show the docs for one option only I think you would have to write a man pages in a different style to make that really usefull. The best place for you to create a PR is against the original program, it says on Explainshell that everything is built upon the original man pages, or maybe you can create some kind of new service like http://www.bashoneliners.com https://www.commandlinefu.com to add your own documentation for random commands and options..

That said good documentation is a hard problem, what to document, how to do it, and what use it will have down the line. Your goal is not everyone elses goal, I always come to the problem from the other side: "I need this extra thing from this command, do I need to code somehting custom or is there something that can do it for me". So it's mostly a question of refrasing problems that fit the tools I have rather than looking up what one option does.

As far as missing command flags, this explains what to do: https://github.com/idank/explainshell/issues/1

What about: man foo | grep bar

Then you only get the line with "bar" in it. (append -C 1 at the end to get 1 line before and 1 after the term you grepped for).

And of course you can pimp your terminal experience by using fish (https://fishshell.com/) as it ships with autosuggestions and other really nice features. (Beware that it will not provide 100% POSIX compliance but if that's an issue you can use ZSH or pimp your bash as well).

Then there is other kind of man pages like TLDR (https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr) which is curated by community and quite awesome ;-)

Reminds me of 'expert sex change,' haha.

Yup and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13989215, from 2017.

Curious, how long is it until it's okay to post a duplicate?

It's a classic "fork bomb": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb

Not quite wiki (you have to create your own notes) but you may find this utility helpful: https://github.com/sinclairtarget/um

You define a function named :, which calls iself and goes in the background. Then you call : at the end and start the neverending chain of :-calls till your memory bleeds.

You have gazed upon the smileyface of doom.

Also, that does sound great.

It defines a function : that launches two copies of itself in the background. Then it calls that function.

    bomb() { bomb | bomb & }; bomb

Its also known as a fork bomb! I have one tattooed on my arm.

Interesting that WSL does not take the entire host to doom.

I'm surprised that some sites just don't load on a 5 year old environment while providing nothing more valuable than sites from 15 years ago. Frameworks just need to do better.

>Bash has a huge number of little shortcuts that are difficult to learn. [snip] it is difficult to Google for its meaning

Everything you could ever ask for is in the manual and also in the man page.

RTFM: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html

If you need a tutorial or a guide then try this one: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/FullBashGuide

Or, alternately, most people on this site are interested in learning how to use the shell, and are therefore interested in tools like explainshell, which make such learning easier.

Because it's a good example of confusing shell code?!?