What is tldr-pages?

The tldr-pages project is a collection of community-maintained help pages for command-line tools, that aims to be a simpler, more approachable complement to traditional man pages.

Maybe you're new to the command-line world? Perhaps you're just a little rusty or can't always recall the arguments for commands like lsof, or tar?

It certainly doesn't help that the first option explained in man tar is:

-b blocksize
   Specify the block size, in 512-byte records, for tape drive I/O.
   As a rule, this argument is only needed when reading from or writing to tape drives,
   and usually not even then as the default block size of 20 records (10240 bytes) is very common.

There seems to be room for simpler help pages, focused on practical examples. How about:

This repository is just that: an ever-growing collection of examples for the most common UNIX, Linux, macOS, SunOS, Android and Windows command-line tools.

How do I use it?

A popular and convenient way to access these pages on your computer is to install the Node.js client, which is supported by the tldr-pages project maintainers:

npm install -g tldr

Alternatively, you can also use the Python client, which can be installed via pip3.

pip3 install tldr

Or Mac users can also install our C Client using Homebrew.

brew install tldr

Then you have direct access to simplified, easy-to-read help for commands, such as tar, accessible through typing tldr tar instead of the standard man tar.

If you want an offline version without installing any software, check out the PDF version.

For browsing without installing a client to your computer, see the web client at https://tldr.inbrowser.app (with offline support using PWA).

There are also various other clients provided by the community, both for the command-line and for other platforms. For a comprehensive list of clients, head over to our Wiki.

How do I contribute to tldr-pages?

All contributions are welcome!

Some ways to contribute include:

• Adding your favorite command which isn't covered.
• Adding examples or improving the content of an existing page.
• Adding requested pages from our issues with the help wanted label.
• Translating pages into different languages.

All tldr pages are written in markdown, so they can be edited quite easily and changes can be submitted in pull requests here using Git on the command-line or using the GitHub web interface.

But we already have some plugins for different editors to enhance the tldr page editing experience:

• Emacs

For editors without a plugin system, we provide a set of configurations in a separate repo.

We strive to maintain a welcoming and collaborative community. If it's your first time contributing, have a look at the contributing guidelines, and go ahead!

If you'd like to contribute to translations, you can visit https://lukwebsforge.github.io/tldri18n/ to see the overall progress of all translations, and which translations are missing or outdated.

Similar projects

• Cheat allows you to create and view interactive cheatsheets on the command-line. It was designed to help remind *nix system administrators of options for commands that they use frequently, but not frequently enough to remember.

• cheat.sh Aggregates cheat sheets from multiple sources (including tldr-pages) into 1 unified interface.

• devhints Rico's cheatsheets are not just focused on the command-line and include a plethora of other cheatsheets related to programming.

• eg provides detailed examples with explanations on the command-line. Examples come from the repository, but eg supports displaying custom examples and commands alongside the defaults.

• kb is a minimalist command-line knowledge base manager. kb can be used to organize your notes and cheatsheets in a minimalist and clean way. It also supports non-text files.

• navi is an interactive cheatsheet tool, which allows you to browse through specific examples or complete commands on the fly.

• bropages (deprecated) are a highly readable supplement to man pages. It shows concise, common-case examples for Unix commands. The examples are submitted by the user base, and can be voted up or down; the best entries are what people see first when they look up a command.

What does "tldr" mean?

TL;DR stands for "Too Long; Didn't Read". It originated as Internet slang, where it is used to indicate that a long text (or parts of it) has been skipped as too lengthy. Read more in How-To Geek's article.