Three layers of "how do I use this?"
Man pages are exhaustive. Sometimes you don't want exhaustive. You want an example. tldr and cheat.sh exist to give you exactly that — copy-paste-ready snippets for the most common usages.
The --help flag — fastest answer
Almost every modern command supports --help (some only -h; a few stubborn ones use -?). The output is shorter than the man page and usually shows a one-line summary, the synopsis, and the most-used options. Pipe it through less if it's long: git --help | less.
tldr — community examples
tldr shows 5–8 example invocations for a command. tldr tar shows you how to extract, compress, list contents, preserve permissions — all real one-liners, not abstract option descriptions. Install with brew install tlrc or npm install -g tldr.
cheat.sh — searchable cheat sheets
Even more powerful: a curl-friendly knowledge base. curl cheat.sh/find spits a find cheat sheet. curl cheat.sh/python/list+comprehension answers programming questions. No install needed, but you can shell-alias cheat for convenience.
info — GNU's verbose alternative
GNU's preferred docs format. info bash opens a hyperlinked browser inside the terminal. Most developers ignore it because man and --help cover the daily need, but for things like grep and sed the GNU info pages have richer examples.
The order I actually use
tldr— "give me a working example"command --help | less— "what flags exist?"man command— "I need the authoritative truth"cheat.sh— "weird question, hope someone wrote it down"