Most of the time I use applications with graphical interface but sometimes I still use console tools. They are often faster and more reliable. In some cases there are no alternatives to some command line tools or simply there is no graphical interface available. The problem is that I always forget how to invoke some specific commands.

In that situations I check man pages or simply google it. There is a small utility called tldr that can display only short documentation (in contrast to man pages) with examples how to use given command. To install this tool use brew formula.

brew install tldr

One of commands that I always forget how to use is tar. You need to pass different letters as arguments defining for example if I need to pack or unpack an archive. Invoking tar –help prints all available modifiers and can be time consuming to figure out which are really useful. So let’s use tldr.

It prints out very short description what command does with some examples how to invoke command in some most useful scenarios. In fact you don’t have to install it on your computer because you can check it online here https://tldr.ostera.io/tar

• Shell