img title=“I don’t know what’s worse–the fact that after 15 years of using tar I still can’t keep the flags straight, or that after 15 years of technological advancement I’m still mucking with tar flags that were 15 years old when I started.”
A little trick I learned on here was to imagine yourself as a little evil man saying “Extract ze files!” in a German accent. Extract ze files >>> xzf.
Only works for tar.gz. Remember there’s also tar.xz, tar.bz, tar.bz2 and half have their own extractor flag. FUN. It’s usually J.
Wouldn’t tar --help suffice? Afaik, it returns exit code 0.
Surely
tar --help
is a valid tar command, right?tar xzvf file.tar.gz
I got it memorized after installing gentoo over and over again from stage 3 back in 2005tar -h
I’ll take my award in all ones please
If you can’t tar to a pipe into ssh to a remote host and untar into an arbitrary location there, are you really using Unix?
I had to pipe dd through gzip over SSH recently to locally image a disk on a cloud server. That was fun.
tar
Done. That’s a valid command, no error code, nothing. KISS!
tar -xzvf archive.tar.gz
eXtract Zhe Vucking File
Sorry, it was Solaris - you just blew it up (the minus is invalid on many Unix versions of tar)
Oh come on!
xtract ze vucking file
Then comes a .tar.bz2 file along and you’re screwed. xtract je vucking file?
Pro tip: -z, -j are not needed by tar anymore since many years, tar will autodetect what compression was used if your distro is anything remotely modern.
You still might want to do something like alias pbtar='tar --use-compress-prog=pbzip2 to easily use pbzip2 - unless you have an ancient system that’ll speed things up significantly. And even if you don’t it’d be nice to use it for creation - to utilize more than one core the archive needs to be created for parallel extraction.
Pro tip: -z, -j are not needed by tar anymore since many years, tar will autodetect what compression was used if your distro is anything remotely modern.
😵
man tar
“Yeah nvm, we’re fucked”
deleted by creator
tar --help
is a valid commandMore of a request than a command, I’d have argued
I command you to show me the manual
tar xvf somearchive.tar
Is that right? )= I’m scared I lost.
user@server:~> tar xvf somearchive.tar
tar: somearchive.tar: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
Scheiße…