TLDR

I’ve been doing a bit of Linux work lately, and I’ve stumbled upon this thing called TLDR, so I thought I would share it here.

Manpages

If you do much Linux work, one of the first things you should have learned about was manpages. This is the Linux built-in help system. There’s a lot of commands in Linux and they all have a bunch of options. It can be difficult to remember what all the options are and what all the commands do. That’s where man pages come in. You type in man and the name of the command and it shows the manual for the command. It lists all the options and what they do.

As an example, the cp command copies files. I can never seem to remember the order of the source and destination. I can also never remember how to copy folders. So I often use the manpages.

Too Long Didn’t Read (TLDR)

The downside to manpages is that they are very dense. There is a lot of information crammed in there. It’s also not typically written in plain English and lacks good examples. Manpages can be challenging to use and even when they are useful it takes a long time to sort through all the info. This is where tldr comes in. It gives you simple clear examples. See below.

Installation

Installation is just a simple package install.

sudo apt-get install tldr

It’s also available as a Python or NPM package

pip3 install tldr

or

npm install -g tldr