Simple script to explain what a command does using https://explainshell.com/

explain

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'open-uri'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'erb'


if ARGV.size < 1
  puts "Usage: explain <COMMAND> [OPTIONS]"
  exit 1
end

command = ERB::Util.url_encode(ARGV.join(' '))
url = URI.parse("https://www.explainshell.com/explain?cmd=#{command}")
result = Nokogiri::HTML(open(url))

puts result.xpath('//title').first.content
puts
result.xpath('//pre').each do |node|
  puts '-'*24
  puts node.content
end
puts '-'*24

CLI wrapper to http://explainshell.com/

Example:

explain ls -ltr

Output:

explainshell.com - ls -ltr

------------------------
list directory contents
------------------------
-l     use a long listing format
------------------------
-t     sort by modification time, newest first
------------------------
-r, --reverse
       reverse order while sorting
------------------------