Ever come across a tutorial online that tells you to run a long terminal command, but want to know what each part of it actually means? ExplainShell does exactly that: paste in the command, and it'll tell you what each portion of the code does.


Obviously, you could do this yourself by searching through man pages—and we still recommend you read the man pages to learn more—but this is a really fast, helpful way to understand what you're doing rather than just copying and pasting commands willy-nilly. For example, if a tutorial tells you to run:

ssh -i keyfile -f -N -L 1234:www.google.com:80 host

ExplainShell would explain that -i keyfile selects the file containing your key, -f runs it in the background, and so on. It doesn't work with every command you'll ever come across, but it's a pretty handy tool to have in your arsenal. Hit the link below to check it out.


ExplainShell | via GHacks