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tldr

Community-maintained simplified man pages.

tldr-pages is a community-maintained collection of simplified, example-driven help for command-line tools. Where man tar is hundreds of lines of formal reference, tldr tar is a handful of common invocations: extract, create, list, gzip, verbose. The pages are crowdsourced through GitHub pull requests and reviewed by maintainers.

The project began in 2013 with the philosophy that learning a new command should not require reading thirty pages of exhaustive documentation. Pages are written in Markdown and render the same way regardless of which tldr client you use. Multiple clients exist — a Node.js implementation, several Rust ones (tlrc, tealdeer), Python and Go versions — all consuming the same page repository.

tldr has become a staple of "modern Unix toolbox" articles and is included in essentially every distribution's repositories. It pairs well with man and -h/--help: tldr for the common cases, the others for the full reference.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install tldr
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install tldr
Arch:          sudo pacman -S tldr
macOS:         brew install tldr