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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://mintlify.com/tldr-pages/tldr/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

tldr-pages is a community-maintained collection of help pages for command-line tools, designed to be a simpler and more approachable complement to traditional man pages. Rather than burying you in flags, history, and edge-case descriptions, every tldr page cuts straight to the most practical, real-world examples — so you can get the answer you need and get back to work.
All tldr pages are community-maintained and freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license. Contributions from anyone are welcome — adding a new page, improving examples, or translating into another language.

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What is tldr-pages?

Traditional man pages are comprehensive references — but their depth can make them hard to use when you just need a quick reminder. Consider the very first option described by man tar: 
$ man tar
...
-b blocksize
   Specify the block size, in 512-byte records, for tape drive I/O.
   As a rule, this argument is only needed when reading from or writing to tape drives,
   and usually not even then as the default block size of 20 records (10240 bytes) is very common.
...
That’s rarely what you’re looking for. In contrast, tldr tar shows you the commands you actually use: 
tar

  Archiving utility.
  Often combined with a compression method, such as gzip or bzip2.
  More information: https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/tar.html.

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

  - Create a gzipped archive and write it to a file:
    tar czf path/to/target.tar.gz path/to/file1 path/to/file2 ...

  - Extract a (compressed) archive file into the current directory verbosely:
    tar xvf path/to/source.tar[.gz|.bz2|.xz]

  - List the contents of a tar file verbosely:
    tar tvf path/to/source.tar
The philosophy is simple: show the most common patterns first, with practical placeholders that make it immediately clear what to substitute. tldr-pages covers UNIX, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, SunOS, Android, Windows, Cisco IOS, and DOS command-line tools.

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How pages are organized

Pages live in a directory tree rooted at pages/ for English content. Translation directories follow the naming pattern pages.<locale>/ using POSIX Locale Names (e.g. pages.fr for French, pages.zh_TW for Chinese Taiwan, pages.pt_BR for Portuguese Brazil). Within each language directory, pages are grouped by platform subdirectory: 
pages/
├── common/       # Commands that work the same across platforms
├── linux/        # Linux-specific commands
├── osx/          # macOS-specific commands (alias: macos)
├── windows/      # Windows-specific commands
├── android/      # Android-specific commands
├── freebsd/      # FreeBSD-specific commands
├── openbsd/      # OpenBSD-specific commands
├── netbsd/       # NetBSD-specific commands
├── sunos/        # SunOS-specific commands
├── cisco-ios/    # Cisco IOS commands
└── dos/          # DOS commands

pages.fr/         # French translations (same subdirectory structure)
pages.de/         # German translations
pages.zh_TW/      # Chinese (Taiwan) translations
...
If a command behaves identically across most platforms but differs on one, the canonical page stays in common/ and a platform-specific variant is placed in the relevant platform directory. Clients resolve which page to show based on the host platform, falling back to common/ automatically. Page filenames map directly to command names, with spaces replaced by dashes:
CommandFilename
tartar.md
git checkoutgit-checkout.md
7za7za.md

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Supported platforms

common

Commands that work the same across more than one platform. This is the largest and most frequently used category.

linux

Commands specific to Linux distributions, including package managers and system utilities.

osx / macos

Commands specific to macOS. Clients support macos as an alias for osx.

windows

Commands and utilities specific to Microsoft Windows, including PowerShell and CMD tools.

android

Commands available in Android environments such as Termux.

freebsd

Commands specific to the FreeBSD operating system.

openbsd

Commands specific to the OpenBSD operating system.

netbsd

Commands specific to the NetBSD operating system.

sunos

Commands specific to Oracle SunOS / Solaris environments.

cisco-ios

Commands for Cisco IOS network device management.

dos

Classic DOS commands and batch scripting utilities.

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Key features

  • 4,500+ pages covering the most common command-line tools across all supported platforms
  • 40+ languages — translations are contributed by the community and tracked at tldri18n
  • Offline caching via ZIP — clients download a full archive from GitHub Releases so pages are available without an internet connection
  • Official Client Specification v2.3 — a standardized spec that all compliant clients must implement, covering argument flags, page resolution, language detection, and caching
  • Placeholder syntax — editable values are wrapped in {{double braces}} so you can instantly spot what to replace, while {{[-s|--longflag]}} syntax lets clients display either short or long option forms
  • Subcommand support — multi-word commands like git checkout or git status each have their own dedicated page, stored as git-checkout.md and git-status.md
Don’t want to install anything? Try the web client at https://tldr.inbrowser.app — it’s a Progressive Web App with full offline support, so you can even pin it to your home screen or desktop.

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