Shell programming is widely used to accomplish various tasks in Unix and Linux platforms. However, the large number of shell commands available, e.g., 50,000+ commands are documented in the Ubuntu Manual Pages (MPs), makes it a big challenge for programmers to find appropriate commands for a task. Although there are some tutorials (e.g., TLDR) with examples manually created to address the challenge, the tutorials only cover a limited number of frequently used commands for shell beginners and provide limited support for users to search commands by a task. In this paper, we introduce a novel web-based tool, ShellFusion, which can automatically generate comprehensive answers (including relevant commands, scripts, and explanations) for shell programming tasks by fusing multi-source knowledge mined from Q&A posts, Ubuntu MPs, and TLDR tutorials. Our evaluation on 434 shell programming tasks shows that ShellFusion significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches by at least 179.6% in terms of MRR@K and MAP@K. A user study conducted with 20 shell programmers further shows that ShellFusion can help users address programming tasks more efficiently and accurately.

ShellFusion Tool: http://shellfusion.cn/

Demo Video: https://youtu.be/P0YJzpKBmnA