this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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I don't understand why people think this is such a useful thing. Sure it has some good summaries but you can't find all info there whereas man pages should have everything. It's also good that tldr has examples but I think it's something man should more often have too. So why would people rather use this than man?
For example I often forget the order of pattern and file in grep. I can look it up easily in both man and tldr. I also forget what was the short option for recursion. Was it -r, -R or either or something else entirely? I can easily do a search on my pager to find the option in man but there's only long option available in tldr. That's Too Long Don't Want to Type.
I think most people use only the main functions of the program and not all of them
Would you agree that man page with good example section of common use cases would better serve the purpose or do you think there has to be separate tool to show only a short summary of the manual?
For most programs, manpage or -h is more than a whole screen of text.... 99% of the time i'm just looking for a common usuage example in one line. Tldr provides that very quickly
I agree that the first option is better because it doesn't need the support of a third party.
I (not who you are asking) responded to your original comment about cheat.sh, but feot kinda fitting here too,
in the case if cheat.sh it does so much more than the manpages that I would definitely say that manpages should keep doing it's thing, because these tools strive to do more, which both makes them valuable and makes the manpages the right tool for it's thing.
I think cheat.sh has the upper hand over tldr, it retrieves the DBs from tldr and others, gives far better results imo. rsync is a decent exampøe where cheat.sh does better than tldr imo: https://cheat.sh/rsync
as for cheat.sh vs manpages: each has their uses. As someone who uses rsync once every .. two months, maybe, cheat.sh gives me the info i need much quicker. ie: -avz, but maybe -c if you want to verify file integrity, that's 8 lines/2 examples in, but reading the manpage of rsync then checksumming is almost something you need to know to look for, which is fine for what the manpages are intended for. these cheatsheets gives you common use cases, and are more of a quick reference.
also cheat.sh gives a lot more functionality than man, I can recommended skimming over the github page https://github.com/chubin/cheat.sh