Master Command‑Line Cheat Sheets: tldr, cheat, and cht.sh Explained

Measuring HTTP request latency with curl

Use a shell loop to invoke curl with -w to output timing metrics. Example for Bash/Zsh:

for i in {1..10}; do
  curl -o /dev/null -s -w "$i | namelookup:%{time_namelookup} | connect:%{time_connect} | starttransfer:%{time_starttransfer} | total:%{time_total}
" http://httpbin.org/ip
done

The output shows per‑run values for time_namelookup, time_connect, time_starttransfer, and time_total, which can be used to benchmark API response latency.

TL;DR simplified manual pages

Install the tldr client globally with npm: npm install -g tldr After installation, retrieve concise examples for any command:

tldr curl
tldr tar
tldr git checkout

Typical tar examples:

tar -cf target.tar file1 file2 file3          # create archive
tar -czf target.tar.gz file1 file2 file3        # create gzipped archive
tar -xf source.tar -C directory                # extract to directory

Typical curl examples:

# download a file
curl -O http://example.com/file

# follow redirects and resume
curl -O -L -C - http://example.com/file

# send JSON payload
curl -d '{"name":"bob"}' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' http://example.com/api

Source code and community pages are hosted at https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr .

cheat – extensible cheat‑sheet manager

Install with pip: pip install cheat Key commands: cheat <command> – show examples for a program cheat -e <command> – edit a cheatsheet cheat -l – list available cheatsheets cheat -s <command> – search cheatsheets

Example for curl (excerpt):

# download a single file
curl http://example.com/file

# download with custom filename
curl http://example.com/file.zip -o new_file.zip

# download multiple files
curl -O URL1 -O URL2

# resume a failed download
curl -C - -o partial.zip http://example.com/file.zip

# fetch only HTTP headers
curl -I http://example.com

# get external IP as JSON
curl http://ifconfig.me/all/json

Project repository: https://github.com/cheat/cheat .

cht.sh – instant online cheat sheets

Query cheat sheets without installing any tool by sending an HTTP request to the service:

curl cht.sh/curl
curl cht.sh/tar
curl cht.sh/python/requests

The response contains the same concise examples shown by tldr and cheat. The web interface is available at https://tldr.sh/ .

Additional command‑line resources

For Windows users, the cmder console and the Microsoft Terminal ( https://github.com/microsoft/Terminal ) provide an enhanced terminal experience.