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Thetldr-pages project is a collection of community-maintained help pagesfor command-line tools, that aims to be a simpler, more approachable complementto traditionalman 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 likelsof, ortar?

It certainly doesn't help that, in the past, the first option explained inman 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 is room for simpler help pages focused on practical examples.How about:

This repository is just that: an ever-growing collection of examplesfor the most common UNIX, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,SunOS, Android, Windows, Cisco IOS, and DOS command-line tools.

A popular and convenient way to access these pages on your computeris to install the officialPython client, which can be installed fromPyPI viapipx (orother package managers):

pipx install tldr

Linux and Mac users can also install the officialRust Client usingHomebrew(orother package managers on other operating systems):

brew install tlrc

Windows users can also install the officialRust Client usingWinget (orother package managers on other operating systems):

winget install tldr-pages.tlrc

Alternatively, you can also use the officialNode.js client, although it has fallen behind in updates:

npm install -g tldr

Then you have direct access to simplified, easy-to-read help for commands, such astar,accessible through typingtldr tar instead of the standardman tar.

If you don't want to install any software, check out thePDF version instead.

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

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 thehelp wanted label.
• Translating pages into different languages.

Alltldr pages are written in Markdown so that they can be edited quite easily and changes can be submitted inpull requests here using Git on the command-line orusing the GitHub web interface.

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

If you'd like to contribute to translations, you can visithttps://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 thematrix chatroom!

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

• devhintsRico's cheatsheets are not just focused on the command-line andinclude a plethora of other cheatsheets related to programming.

• egprovides detailed examples with explanations on the command-line.Examples come from the repository, buteg supports displayingcustom examples and commands alongside the defaults.

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

• naviis an interactive cheatsheet tool, which allows you to browse throughspecific examples or complete commands on the fly.

• Cheatallows you to create and view interactive cheatsheets on the command-line.It was designed to help remind Unix system administrators of optionsfor commands that they use frequently, but not frequently enough to remember.

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

• 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.

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'sarticle.