You don’t need the complete works of POSIX. You need to know that tar -xzf exists and move on with your life.
tldr is a community-maintained collection of simplified, example-driven man pages. Where man dumps the full contract of a command — every flag, every edge case, in ROFF — tldr gives you eight or so realistic invocations with one-line explanations. It’s the difference between documentation written by the author and documentation written by someone who just needed to get unblocked. The client is a small binary that fetches pages from the tldr pages repository (there are OS-specific, Linux, and common sections), caches them locally, and renders them in your pager. Because the pages are just markdown files on GitHub, contributions are trivial and coverage of modern CLI tools (ripgrep, fd, xh) is often better than their man pages are at being *readable*.
install
# macOS
brew install tldr
# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install tldr
# Fedora (tealdeer client, provides the `tldr` binary)
sudo dnf install tealdeer
# Arch
sudo pacman -S tldr
examples
# The classic — how do I untar something, again?
tldr tar
# Works for anything with a page, including tools you just installed
tldr xh
tldr duf
# --platform for cross-platform commands with OS-specific behavior
tldr --platform linux ip
# --raw outputs the page as plain markdown — pipe-friendly, no pager formatting
tldr --raw jq | head -20
# Update the local cache (pages ship via the repo, so it ages)
tldr --update
# Not sure of the exact command name? Search what's there
tldr --search "disk usage"
pro tip
Add a shell function like alias help='tldr' — muscle memory says help tar, and it works for the 90% of cases where you want an example, not a specification. Also: if a page is thin or wrong, you can fix it in a PR; the pages repo has a live preview bot that makes contributing painless.
honest limits
tldr is examples, not reference. It will not tell you every flag, exit codes, or subtle behavior — that’s what man is for, and reaching for tldr first on genuinely complex commands (awk, find with -exec) will eventually bite you. Coverage is community-driven: obscure or brand-new tools may have no page, and pages are written by humans who sometimes disagree with each other. Offline use depends on a cache you have to remember to update. And the client is intentionally dumb — no shell completion of page names beyond what your shell gives you.