• ForthEorlingas@lemmy.ca
    32·
    1 year ago

    On a related note, the website cheat.sh is also a great resource. Just curl it with the command you want to learn about as the endpoint.

    For example, if I want to learn about grep, just open a terminal and

    $ curl cheat.sh/grep

    And a short and sweet description with examples will be returned.

      • Agility0971@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        curl cheat.sh/command is more useful because it just spits out common examples. man is only useful if you need complete documentation or need to build a complex oneliner.

        I never remember hot to extract tar files. Would you dive into the documentation for that or look up a cheatsheet?

      • 347_is_p69@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Cheat.sh has usage examples, with short descriptions. It’s purpose is remembering something you have already done. It’s much more similar to --help flag than full manpage.

        Reading the cheat.sh of a command I don’t know at all is rarely useful. I use it when simply listing the flags isn’t enough, or the output unhelpfully long. curl returns so fast that it’s faster to request data from external server than read through three paragraphs.

        If you haven’t tried it, give it a go. The whole point is to be very quick to type and give back text that is fast to read.