A term-weighting and document-scoring function is used to search for a command line interface (CLI) script that is likely relevant to an operation specified in a natural language query. CLI scripts are created to perform various operations of a CLI-based application. A CLI script is associated with a description document having keywords associated with the individual commands used in the CLI script. The relevance of a CLI script to an intended operation is based on the term-weighting and document-scoring function which is applied to each component of each command in a CLI script and weighted accordingly.