Cheat sheet · OtherFree

tldr pages

Community written summaries of command line tools showing the handful of invocations people actually use, as a replacement for wading through a manual page. Available as a command you install.

Format

Cheat sheet

Topic

Other

Provider

tldr pages

Time needed

Seconds per lookup

Level

All

Access

Free

What it is

Simplified help pages for command line tools, each showing five to eight common examples with real arguments filled in, available in the terminal via a client you install or on the web.

The problem it solves

Manual pages are exhaustive reference documents, which makes them excellent for finding an obscure flag and terrible for the far more common case of remembering how to extract a compressed archive. Most people solve this by searching the web and copying from a forum answer of unknown quality.

How to use it

Install a client and alias it to something short. It is one of those changes that seems trivial and quietly removes a small friction dozens of times a week.

Best for: anyone who works in a terminal and has looked up the same tar invocation more than twice.

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