tldr

A collection of simplified and community-driven man pages.

Install it with npm install -g tldr or try the web client.

What is tldr?

New to the command-line world? Or just a little rusty? Or perhaps you can't always remember the arguments to lsof, or tar?

Maybe it 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.

Surely people could benefit from simplified man 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 commands.

Clients

You can access these pages on your computer using one of the following clients:

• Alfred Workflow
• Android clients:
  • tldr-viewer, available on Google Play
  • tldroid, available on Google Play
• Bash clients:
  • tldr
  • tldr-bash-client
• C# client
• C++ client: brew install tldr
• Chrome Extension available on Chrome Web Store
• Crystal client: brew install porras/tap/tlcr
• Dart client: pub global activate tldr
• Dash docset: Open Preferences > Downloads > User Contributed and find tldr pages in the list
• Docker images:
  • tldr-docker- Run the tldr command via a docker container: alias tldr='docker run --rm -it -v ~/.tldr/:/root/.tldr/ nutellinoit/tldr'
• Elixir client (binaries not yet available)
• Emacs client, available on MELPA
• Go clients:
  • github.com/pranavraja/tldr: go get github.com/pranavraja/tldr (or platform binaries)
  • 4d63.com/tldr: go get 4d63.com/tldr or brew install 4d63/tldr/tldr (or platform binaries)
  • github.com/elecprog/tldr: go get github.com/elecprog/tldr (or platform binaries)
  • github.com/isacikgoz/tldr: go get github.com/isacikgoz/tldr (or platform binaries)
• iOS clients:
  • tldr-man-page, available on App Store
  • tldr-pages, available on App Store
• Haskell client: stack install tldr
• Node.js client: npm install -g tldr
• OCaml client: opam install tldr
• Perl5 client: cpanm App::tldr
• PHP client: composer global require brainmaestro/tldr
• Python clients:
  • tldr-python-client: pip install tldr or pacman -S tldr on Arch Linux
  • tldr.py: pip install tldr.py
• R client: devtools::install_github('kirillseva/tldrrr')
• Ruby client: gem install tldrb
• Rust clients:
  • rust-tldr (thin client with online lookup): cargo install tldr
  • tealdeer (fully featured client with offline cache): cargo install tealdeer
• Visual Studio Code extension available on Visual Studio Code Marketplace
• Web clients:
  • tldr.jsx: http://tldr.ostera.io/
  • DistroWatch

There is also a comprehensive list of clients in our Wiki.

Contributing

• Your favourite command isn't covered?
• You can think of more examples for an existing command?

Contributions are most welcome! We strive to maintain a welcoming and collaborative community. Have a look at the contributing guidelines, and go ahead!

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.

• Bro pages are a highly readable supplement to man pages. Bro pages show 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.

• 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.

What does "tldr" mean?

TL;DR stands for "Too Long; Didn't Read". It originates in 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 Wikipedia's TL;DR article.