Use ChatGPT to explain bash scripts

Today I learned that chatGPT is pretty good at explaining cryptic bash scripts and commands. I was trying to understand exactly how a git prepare-commit-msg hook was working so I asked chatGPT to “explain the following git hook to me” and it did a pretty good job.

For example, it returned tidbits like:

[[ $BRANCH_NAME =~ $BRANCH_REGEX ]]: This conditional statement checks if the branch name matches the BRANCH_REGEX pattern. If the branch name starts with one or more digits, this condition will be true. and: sed -i.bak -e "1s/^#${BASH_REMATCH[1]}: //I" $1: This line uses the sed command to replace the branch number (captured by the BRANCH_REGEX pattern) and a colon at the beginning of the commit message with an empty string. The I flag makes the replacement case-insensitive. The -i.bak option creates a backup of the original commit message file with a .bak extension.

Bonus TIL: the BASH_REMATCH variable is automatically populated with the matched string in bash when using the =~ regex operator