ShellFusion: An Answer Generator for Shell Programming Tasks via Knowledge Fusion

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 multisource 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