Naa, tar handles archives, it should know how to archive and unarchive really well. It shouldn't know how to compress or un compress or sort it's output by human readable file sizes. If you add the -z or -j, for example, to your tar command, tar will filter your archive through gunzip or bunzip prior to doing it's job of un archiving all your files. If you use the -f flag, tar will spit out a list of files that were operated on. Adding a sort -h feature to tar would violate the unix philosophy.