Tradional Usage
  tar {A|c|d|r|t|u|x}[GnSkUWOmpsMBiajJzZhPlRvwo] [ARG...]

It is invigorating.

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[–] 21 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

tar is usually smart enough to figure that .tar.gz is a compressed archive, so tar xvf suffices.

Moreover, .tar.xz archives are much more common nowadays, and the flag to tell tar to use xz decompression is J. Yes, uppercase J I shit you not, because all other letters of alphabet were already taken. The next commandline option added to tar is going to be a Unicode emoji symbol.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 hours ago (1 child)

    The flag to extract .bz2 files is 'j'. Not confusing at all.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

    Burrows–Wheeler algorithm or block-compression algorithm, the bzip2 file compression program was developed by Julian Seward.

    Ah yes, totally makes sense.

    XZ Utils started as a Unix port of Igor Pavlov's LZMA (Lempel–Ziv–Markov) algorithm, by Lasse Collin, and then by the Tukaani Project.

    So apparently the uppercase J stands for "that guy who made a better compression algorithm than Julian".

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  • [–] 3 points 1 hour ago

    i always forgot about -J so i got used to writing tar --xz -cvf archive.tar.xz file1 file2… instead. it's a bit more explicit and i'll never have to hunt for the same flag in the man page again.

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