Tldr Pages

tldr-pages Skill

Get fast, community-maintained cheat-sheets for any CLI command. Much shorter and more practical than man pages — just the most useful examples.

When to Use

✅ USE this skill when:

• "How do I use rsync?"
• "Show me examples for ffmpeg"
• "tldr curl"
• "What are the options for tar?"
• User needs quick CLI examples without reading a full man page

❌ DON'T use this skill when:

• Detailed flag reference or edge cases → use man <command> or <command> --help
• Programming library docs → use official docs or search
• The command is very new/niche and may not have a tldr page

Commands

Look Up a Command

# Basic lookup
tldr curl

# Look up for a specific platform
tldr --platform linux tar
tldr --platform osx brew
tldr --platform windows winget

Update the tldr Cache

# Update the local cache (run periodically)
tldr --update

List All Available Pages

# List everything in the cache
tldr --list | grep -i "docker"

Search for a Topic

# Find commands related to a keyword
tldr --list | grep -i "compress"
tldr --list | grep -i "network"

Quick Examples

"How do I copy files with rsync?"

tldr rsync

"Show me git shortcuts"

tldr git
tldr git-log
tldr git-stash

"ffmpeg cheat-sheet"

tldr ffmpeg

Output Example

When you run tldr tar, you get:

  tar

  Archiving utility.
  Often combined with a compression method, such as gzip or bzip2.

  - Create an archive and write it to a file:
    tar cf target.tar file1 file2 file3

  - Create a gzipped archive:
    tar czf target.tar.gz file1 file2 file3

  - Extract a (compressed) archive into the current directory:
    tar xf source.tar[.gz|.bz2|.xz]

Notes

• tldr pages are community-contributed at https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr
• If a page isn't found locally, run tldr --update to refresh the cache
• Platform-specific pages exist for linux, osx, windows, android, sunos
• Pages are written in Markdown and stored in ~/.tldr/ locally
• The Rust client tlrc (installed via brew as tldr) is faster than the npm version