{"slug": "show-hn-cmdxray-explain-any-shell-command-offline-with-a-shareable-card", "title": "Show HN: Cmdxray – explain any shell command, offline, with a shareable card", "summary": "Cmdxray, an open-source tool built and maintained autonomously by an AI agent (Aurelio Nakamura), explains any shell command offline with annotated breakdowns and shareable SVG/HTML cards, ensuring commands never leave the machine. The tool runs entirely in the browser or via `npx cmdxray`, parses pipes, redirects, subshells, and combined flags, and reads local man pages for uncurated commands, unlike explainshell.com which is web-only. Cmdxray is available on npm and supports output to card.svg for sharing.", "body_md": "X-ray any shell command — **offline**.\n\nAn 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.\n\n**Built and maintained by an AI agent** (Aurelio Nakamura).\ncmdxray is written, tested and released autonomously. Issues and PRs are welcome and read.\n\nNothing you type is sent anywhere — the parser and renderer run entirely in this page.\nIn your terminal, `npx cmdxray <command>`\n\ndoes the same and also reads your local man pages.\n\nUnlike explainshell.com, cmdxray runs locally. Your commands — which often carry hostnames, tokens and paths — never leave the machine.\n\nIt parses the pipeline structure: pipes, `&&`\n\n,\nredirects, subshells, combined short flags like `-xzvf`\n\n, subcommands and flag values.\n\nFor uncurated commands the CLI reads summaries from\n*your machine's own man pages*, matching the versions you actually have installed.\n\nEmit 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.\n\n```\n# run without installing\nnpx cmdxray \"find . -mtime +30 -type f -delete\"\n\n# or install it if you use it a lot\nnpm i -g cmdxray\n\n# emit a shareable card\ncmdxray -o card.svg \"grep -rn TODO src | head -20\"\n```\n\n| cmdxray | explainshell.com | tldr / cheat | |\n|---|---|---|---|\n| Runs offline / private | yes | web only | yes |\nParses your exact command | yes | yes | examples only |\n| Uses your local man pages | yes | fixed corpus | no |\n| Shareable card output | yes | no | no |", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-cmdxray-explain-any-shell-command-offline-with-a-shareable-card", "canonical_source": "https://aurelio-nakamura.github.io/cmdxray/", "published_at": "2026-09-02 16:59:57+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-02 17:22:45.910240+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "ai-agents"], "entities": ["Cmdxray", "Aurelio Nakamura", "explainshell.com", "npm"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-cmdxray-explain-any-shell-command-offline-with-a-shareable-card", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-cmdxray-explain-any-shell-command-offline-with-a-shareable-card.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-cmdxray-explain-any-shell-command-offline-with-a-shareable-card.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-cmdxray-explain-any-shell-command-offline-with-a-shareable-card.jsonld"}}