asksh 0.2.0

AI-powered CLI tool that converts natural language into Linux shell commands.

asksh

AI in your terminal: turn plain English into shell commands.

asksh is an AI-powered command-line tool that lets you describe what you want in plain English and returns the exact POSIX shell command to run.

You don't need to leave your terminal to get things done. Don't you remember the exact command to compress a directory with tar? Just asksh.

$ asksh compress a directory with tar.gz excluding the .cache directory
> tar -czf archive.tar.gz --exclude=<dir>.cache <dir>

Installation

Ollama server

asksh expects an Ollama server. Install Ollama, then pull a model (defaults match config.example.toml):

ollama pull qwen2.5-coder

Install the CLI

From PyPI (once published):

pip install asksh
# or: uv tool install asksh

From a clone (development):

git clone [e-mail]:srgsol/asksh.git
cd asksh
uv sync
uv run asksh --help

Requires Python 3.10+.

Configuration (optional defaults)

Defaults can live in a TOML file so you do not repeat --model / --base-url on every run. CLI flags always override the file.

• Default path: $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/asksh/config.toml, or ~/.config/asksh/config.toml if XDG_CONFIG_HOME is unset.
• Override path: set ASKSH_CONFIG to another file.

See config.example.toml in this repository for supported keys (model, base_url, system, context, interactive_on_no_args).

Publishing to PyPI (maintainers)

This project uses flit as the build backend. With flit installed and PyPI credentials configured:

uv build
# inspect dist/ then:
flit publish

Use trusted publishing (e.g. GitHub Actions) for releases when possible.