I bumped into the tremendously site [WayBack] explainshell.com – match command-line arguments to their help text only after documenting the relevant cURL options of yesterdays post on checking your CertBot domain expiration dates.
The site allows put in a shell command-line to see the help text that, including matches for each argument.
It works so well because it parses both the shell command-line and the man pages, then constructs a web-page linking the relevant man page content to the shell command-line in the correct shell command-line order.
The explainshell has a counterpart showthedocs (both are open source) for explaining other languages (on the one hand more extended as it goes much deeper into parsing for instance SQL, on the other hand more limited as it only supports a few languages). More on showthedocs later.
The links
The parsing results
The first bit below is just the text output, and the second bit the screenshot, of a relatively simple command like [WayBack] explainshell.com – curl -fsSL example.org:
transfer a URL
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-f, --fail
(HTTP) Fail silently (no output at all) on server errors. This is mostly done to better enable
scripts etc to better deal with failed attempts. In normal cases when a HTTP server fails to
deliver a document, it returns an HTML document stating so (which often also describes why and
more). This flag will prevent curl from outputting that and return error 22.
This method is not fail-safe and there are occasions where non-successful response codes will slip
through, especially when authentication is involved (response codes 401 and 407).
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-s, --silent
Silent or quiet mode. Don't show progress meter or error messages. Makes Curl mute.
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-S, --show-error
When used with -s it makes curl show an error message if it fails.
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-L, --location
(HTTP/HTTPS) If the server reports that the requested page has moved to a different location
(indicated with a Location: header and a 3XX response code), this option will make curl redo the
request on the new place. If used together with -i, --include or -I, --head, headers from all
requested pages will be shown. When authentication is used, curl only sends its credentials to the
initial host. If a redirect takes curl to a different host, it won't be able to intercept the
user+password. See also --location-trusted on how to change this. You can limit the amount of
redirects to follow by using the --max-redirs option.
When curl follows a redirect and the request is not a plain GET (for example POST or PUT), it will
do the following request with a GET if the HTTP response was 301, 302, or 303. If the response
code was any other 3xx code, curl will re-send the following request using the same unmodified
method.
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The screenshot is even more impressive:
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