Show HN: Cmdxray – explain any shell command, offline, with a shareable card

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.

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. run without installing npx cmdxray "find . -mtime +30 -type f -delete" or install it if you use it a lot npm i -g cmdxray emit a shareable card 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 |