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, in the past, the first option explained in man tar was:

$ man tar
...
-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?

Tip

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

A popular and convenient way to access these pages on your computer is to install the official Node.js client:

npm install -g tldr

Alternatively, you can also use the official Python client, which can be installed via pip3 (or other package managers):

pip3 install tldr

Linux and Mac users can also install the official Rust Client using Homebrew (or other package managers on other operating systems):

brew install tlrc

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 don't want to install any software, check out the PDF version instead.

Note

PDFs for translations are available for most languages. You can find them in the releases assets of the latest release.

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 that 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.

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.

You are also welcome to join us on the matrix chatroom!

Similar projects

• Command Line Interface Pages allows you to write standardized help pages for CLI, directories, and configs.

• Cheat allows you to create and view interactive cheatsheets on the command-line. It was designed to help remind Unix 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.