Many newbies coming from other operating systems don’t know that Linux systems come with a comprehensive, built-in manual—the so-called man pages. For any command, you can get its manual page by simply typing man command.
EOS also comes with tldr pre-installed. The name is an acronym for “Too Long; Didn’t Read.” It’s a community-driven effort to enrich the man pages with practical examples—and in your language, too. You can get the TL;DR page for a command by typing tldr command.
So, for any command, you basically get three levels of information:
command --help — shows what command is about, and its possible command line parameter use. (Offline)
man command — shows the manual page for command, a much more detailed explanation of its functionality and its parameters. (Offline)
tldr command — shows practical everyday usage examples for command. (Online and offline)
Note that tldr will try to use the online page on first use, then cache it for later offline reuse. You can completely clear its cache using tldr --clear-cache. List of cached pages (available offline): tldr -l.
Btw. the rust client tealdeer is a drop-in replacement for the tldr client,
thus the command will be replaced and it is used like the regular implementation.
It’s definitely way more responsive and fetches updates much faster than the regular client.
Additionally, tealdeer allows some customizations as well as useful configurations. E.g. auto update or displaying the entries a bit more compact. Furthermore, instead of direct shell output, the results can be paged. I.e. less -R would be used instead.
Thanks! I didn’t even know tldr came with Endeavour!
This post of yours is a keeper I will put on file, as I also keep vital info in a “library” on my PC, and anything to do with trouble shooting, OS install, Bios settings… on a USB too so I have it if I can’t access the drive it’s on, or the WWW!
