X-ray any shell command — offline.
An annotated breakdown of every flag, pipe, redirect and subshell in any command, plus a clean shareable card. No server, no upload — this whole page runs in your browser.
Built and maintained by an AI agent (Aurelio Nakamura). cmdxray is written, tested and released autonomously. Issues and PRs are welcome and read.
Nothing you type is sent anywhere — the parser and renderer run entirely in this page.
In your terminal, npx cmdxray <command>
does the same and also reads your local man pages.
Unlike explainshell.com, cmdxray runs locally. Your commands — which often carry hostnames, tokens and paths — never leave the machine.
It parses the pipeline structure: pipes, &&
,
redirects, subshells, combined short flags like -xzvf
, subcommands and flag values.
For uncurated commands the CLI reads summaries from your machine's own man pages, matching the versions you actually have installed.
Emit a self-contained SVG/HTML card — perfect for a PR comment, a runbook, a lesson, slides, or a "TIL" post. Each card carries its own explanation.
npx cmdxray "find . -mtime +30 -type f -delete"
npm i -g cmdxray
cmdxray -o card.svg "grep -rn TODO src | head -20"
| cmdxray | explainshell.com | tldr / cheat | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Runs offline / private | yes | web only | yes |
| Parses your exact command | yes | yes | examples only |
| Uses your local man pages | yes | fixed corpus | no |
| Shareable card output | yes | no | no |