tldr
by tldr-pages
A community-maintained collection of short help pages for command-line tools, with practical examples instead of the long explanations found in man pages. It is meant for anyone who needs a quick reminder of how to use commands such as tar or lsof.
Worth a lookEstablished, with a few things to check (listed below).
- Stars
- 64k +3 a day
- Licence
- MIT
- Runs on
- Your computer
- Setup
- Easy
- Language
- Markdown
- Age
- 4706 days
What you can do with it
- Look up simple examples for a command by typing, for example, tldr tar
- Browse the pages in a web browser or read the PDF version without installing anything
- Contribute or translate pages for commands that are missing or out of date
Ways a business could use it
- Help non-specialist staff or new freelancers run server and file commands correctly, cutting time spent searching for answers
- Give a small team a shared offline reference for everyday terminal tasks, which can reduce onboarding time
Can you use it commercially?
Free to use, change and sell (MIT-style terms in the licence file). Some folders may carry other terms.
Not legal advice. Read the project's licence file before building a product on it.
Getting it running
Install an official client such as the Python one with pipx install tldr, the Rust one with brew install tlrc or winget, or use the web client or PDF with no install.
Follow the official instructions in the project README.
Things to check
- The licence is not clearly detected by GitHub; the README badge says CC BY 4.0
- The Node.js client has fallen behind in updates
Checked 27 Oct 2026. Summary drafted by AI from the project's README.
