Man pages are meant to help understand how certain Unix/Linux/BSD/macOS console commands work, but it is not clear who they are trying to help, certainly not humans, right? Joking aside, it can be hard to understand a man page and if you want to do something really simple, having to read through a man page can waste a lot of time.

The [tldr](http://tldr.sh/) utility aims to solve that, it is a community driven effort to create useful examples for command line applications. The output of `tldr tar` for example shows you very succinctly how to compress and decompress tarballs:

![Bildschirmfoto 2017-11-24 um 12.37.00.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmYiXeXfb5rp2kNHZ73Tb17gnz8DpSiRkx9CPC9CxDVQaz/Bildschirmfoto%202017-11-24%20um%2012.37.00.png)

Or maybe you are a fan of p7zip:

![Bildschirmfoto 2017-11-24 um 12.36.47.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmUGwxFvxGXLdJ7RTDAdBo2J8qVnceruCYxWmjLR9xgXf4/Bildschirmfoto%202017-11-24%20um%2012.36.47.png)

There are even examples for everyone's favorite text editor Vim:

![Bildschirmfoto 2017-11-24 um 12.36.33.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmcaNMAiX4iHTSgtyVigiSnFwWZb45KRAtJQ2A7AuDy4M7/Bildschirmfoto%202017-11-24%20um%2012.36.33.png)

Sorry, I meant Emacs:

![Bildschirmfoto 2017-11-24 um 12.36.13.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmXHV8NtGJ1pu5CoWzm5gumaJc6EwZeqQtDcZ3wUppheFs/Bildschirmfoto%202017-11-24%20um%2012.36.13.png)

And even programming languages like Python:

![Bildschirmfoto 2017-11-24 um 12.37.49.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmRkG6czVzjoVir6eSAr2J5G6EXFJcFgs4TikWRYf4PtKN/Bildschirmfoto%202017-11-24%20um%2012.37.49.png)

or Go:

![Bildschirmfoto 2017-11-24 um 12.38.04.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmd1G8eWf41BgkUbBS5ie1zh5niZ4hJKVQLvJ1b7TiSsrW/Bildschirmfoto%202017-11-24%20um%2012.38.04.png)

The tldr tool has been implemented in lots of different languages, but the most mature implementation is the node.js one. If you have node installed, installing tldr is as simple as: `npm install -g tldr`

You can also try the tool out on the [web](https://tldr.ostera.io/).

![Bildschirmfoto 2017-11-24 um 12.50.28.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmNmG7J8VncxTfmncwKbKpmbMHzttaEst5HCQU1N7EPXxY/Bildschirmfoto%202017-11-24%20um%2012.50.28.png)

Credit where credit is due, I found this handy tool on [r/programming](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7f11wn/tldr_pages_simplified_and_communitydriven_man/).