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tar -vczfx123 ought to do it (imgs.xkcd.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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."

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I know this is a meme, but I actually find tar fairly easy to remember.

tar -xf $archive is extract file

tar -czf $archive dir/ is create zipped (compressed) file and the positional arguments are the files to add to the archive.

And this is 99% of my usage. You can skip -f $archive to use stdin/stdout or use -C to change directory (weird name but logically tar always extracts to the current directory). There is also a flag to list which I always forget and lookup each time, but I list much less often. -v is useful for verbose.

Overall there are much harder commands to remember. find always gets me if I go beyond -name. ps, tree and ls (beyond -Al) always get me to open the man page.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

There is also a flag to list which I always forget and lookup each time

That would be -t, which I tend to remember as "test", as in testing to see what is inside the archive!

tealdeer is a great program to have installed for easily getting a breakdown of the flags of pretty much any CLI app that at least I can ever think of!