Shell Command Formatter

Make long shell commands readable

Long commands are great for terminals but terrible for documentation. Multi-line commands are easier to read, review and edit, but they can be frustrating to copy and paste, because every line has to end with the right continuation character. DocuFormat lets you switch between the two instantly.

Turning a Bash command from a single line into multiple lines puts each option on its own row, so you can see what a Docker, kubectl or AWS CLI call is actually doing. Going the other way, you can convert a shell command to one line and paste it straight into a terminal, a script or a chat message with no stray backslashes.

Whether you call it formatting, pretty-printing or beautifying a command, the result is the same command, laid out for the place you are about to use it.

Built for developer copy and paste

Commands rarely stay in one place. You find them in one environment and need them in another, and a layout that works in one is often awkward in the next:

• Documentation → Terminal
• Terminal → Documentation
• Slack → Terminal
• GitHub → Terminal
• AI assistant → Terminal
• Terminal → Support ticket

The usual fix is manual cleanup: adding or deleting backslashes, rejoining lines, hoping nothing was lost. DocuFormat removes that step.

1. Paste
2. →
3. Format
4. →
5. Copy

Common sources include READMEs, Stack Overflow answers, cloud documentation, CI/CD configuration and your own terminal history. It is designed for everyday developer commands such as Docker, kubectl, AWS CLI, Git, npm, Maven, Java, SSH, grep, find and cURL.

More than line wrapping

A formatter that only inserts a newline every eighty characters will happily cut a quoted string in half. DocuFormat is meant to understand how a shell command is structured, so it breaks the command at argument and option boundaries instead. Where supported, formatting preserves:

• arguments and options
• quoted strings
• environment variables
• pipes and redirects
• command chaining
• shell escaping

The aim is simple: formatting should improve readability without changing what the command means. As with any tool that rewrites a command, read it over before you run it, especially when it involves unusual quoting or escaping.

docker run \  --name myapp \  --restart unless-stopped \  -p 8080:8080 \  -e APP_ENV=production \  mycompany/myapp:latest

Shell formatting meets cURL intelligence

cURL commands are shell commands, but DocuFormat can understand them at a deeper level. For ordinary shell commands it cleans up the presentation. For cURL it can also identify the HTTP method, URL, headers, request body and authentication, which is what the cURL formatter and cURL parser show.

1. Shell formatter
2. ↓
3. cURL detected
4. ↓
5. Method
6. URL
7. Headers
8. Body

That is the difference between treating a command as generic text and treating it as developer input.

Format the command. Format the data inside it.

A cURL command often carries a JSON body squashed into one quoted string. DocuFormat’s cURL formatter lays out the command and pretty-prints the JSON inside it. Here is a real example:

curl -X POST https://api.example.com/users -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"name":"Steve","active":true}'

curl \  https://api.example.com/users \  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \  --data-raw '{  "name": "Steve",  "active": true}'

Notice that the explicit -X POST is dropped because a request body already implies POST; the method is still shown in the cURL Request view. More in the cURL command formatter guide.

Broken shell command?

Formatting helps when a command is valid. When quoting, escaping, continuations or syntax are broken, DocuFormat’s optional AI Fix can help identify the problem and propose a corrected command. Typical problems include:

• broken or unbalanced quotes
• bad escaping
• incorrect line continuations
• malformed cURL
• damaged commands copied from documentation

AI Fix is optional and only runs when you click it. Your command is not sent to an AI provider before that, you confirm the first time, and the suggestion is a proposal you review, not something applied automatically. See how AI Fix works.

Understand before you run

Some commands are hard to read even when they are tidy. Explain describes a complicated command in plain language, covering its commands, arguments, options, pipes and redirects, and for commands that contain potentially destructive operations the explanation should make that obvious.

find . -type f -name "*.log" -mtime +7 -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Illustrative explanation, generated only when you click Explain: finds regular files named *.log under the current directory that were modified more than 7 days ago, and pipes their names to rm, which deletes them.

The command is analysed as text. DocuFormat does not execute or test it.

DocuFormat formats shell commands. It does not execute them.

Shell commands can contain API tokens, passwords, private URLs, authentication headers, environment variables and infrastructure details. So routine formatting is meant to be deterministic and to need no AI, and a command is only sent to an AI provider after you explicitly choose an AI feature.

• Shell commands are treated as data and are never executed.
• SQL is never executed.
• cURL requests are never executed.

Secrets are not redacted for you, so remove real credentials before using an AI action. Details are on the privacy page.

Questions, answered