Collaborative cheatsheets for console commands 📚.
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 is 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, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, SunOS, Android, Windows, Cisco IOS, and DOS 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).
There are several official clients available.
Python client
The official Python client can be installed from PyPI via pipx (or other package managers):
pipx install tldr
Rust client
Linux and Mac users can also install the official Rust Client using Homebrew, Cargo (or other package managers on other operating systems):
brew install tlrc
cargo install tlrc --locked
Windows users can also install the official Rust Client using Winget (or other package managers on other operating systems):
winget install tldr-pages.tlrc
Node.js client
Alternatively, you can also use the official Node.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 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 release 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 that 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 and the matrix space that contains all tldr related chatrooms!
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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.