Developer utilities · by Idan Kamara

explainshell

Paste a shell command and it splits it into parts, linking each flag and argument to the matching passage of the program's man page (Ubuntu and Arch).

Cryptic one-liners copied from forums turn into a readable map of what every switch actually does before you run them.

DownloadCommercial: conditions

Open explainshell.com ↗ agent.md

For your project

Official API: No official API
Data download: Yes sqlite
License: GPL-3.0 (code); man page text keeps its upstream licenses GPLv3 covers the explainshell code; the released database holds man page text under each page's own license
Commercial use: Commercial use with conditions
“If you want to redistribute the database (or a derivative of it), the permission has to come from the licenses of the individual man pages - do your own compliance review, and preserve the upstream authors' copyright notices” github.com/idank/explainshell
Credit: Not stated
Embedding: Embedding unclear
Using the website: Free

Read on explainshell's own pages on Oct 23, 2026 · license or terms. Check the license page before you ship.

For your agent

No official API. An agent should not scrape the site: use it by hand or through its downloads.

No JSON API and no npm/PyPI package, but it is open source (GPLv3, Python/Flask): clone the repo, run 'make download-latest-db' to get the SQLite db of parsed man pages, and self-host with 'make serve'; the web page URL pattern is /explain?cmd=<command>.
Code reuse is GPLv3: derivative code must stay GPLv3
Redistributing the database needs a per-man-page license review and the upstream copyright notices kept

Paste into your agent: Read https://agentgid.com/resources/explainshell/agent.md before using explainshell.

What you can build

A terminal helper that explains a pasted command offline using a self-hosted explainshell and its SQLite db
A docs or blog plugin that links each shell snippet to its explainshell breakdown
A 'what does this flag do' lookup built on the parsed_manpages table (respecting each man page's license)

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