What website provides man pages where the command options are linkable?

Question

Context

Often when writing something related to Linux commands I want to mention the use of an option of a command.

For example, I could write something like:

You could use the tail -f <file> command to get a scrolling log, here's more information on the -f option.

I can link to various websites that show the full man page of tail, but I cannot find a website where I can link to the description of the -f option directly. The recipient of the message always needs to scroll or do a search for the option I refer to.

Question

Is there a man page website that provides anchors or tags for the command options such that I can link to it directly? Ideally I would be able to link to something like somesite.org/man/commandname#option-name.

Answer 1

Likely, you are looking for explainshell.com

https://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=tail+-f+file

Other example for ls -ltrapR

https://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=ls+-ltrapR

Answer 2

How about generating with man2html, filtering as required, and hosting on a gh-pages (or gitlab pages) repository?

tail -f

This was generated with the following script:

#!/usr/bin/env zsh

touch .nojekyll

: > index.html

for m in /usr/share/man/**/*(.); do
    target="${m#/usr/share/man/}";
    target="${target%.gz}";
    printf %s\\n "$target";
    printf %s\\n "$target" | sed -e 's/&/&amp;/g' | sed -e "s/'/\&quot;/g" | sed -e 's/</\&lt;/g' | sed -e 's/>/\&gt;/g' | sed -e 's~.*~<a href="&">&</a><br />~' >> index.html
    mkdir -p "$(dirname "$target")";
    man2html "$m" | sed -ne '/^$/,$p' | perl -pe 'BEGIN{$k=0};s/<DT>/"<DT id=\"" . ++$k . "\">"/e' > "$target.html";
done

I can't promise I'll keep these online (most pages seem to have a COPYRIGHT section which specifies the open-source license that they use, and I don't think I have any proprietary packages installed, but I might've missed a couple in which case I'll take them down if I notice or anyone else points it out) or that I won't improve the links, so if you actually want reliable permalinks, host your own copy by forking the repo :).