You adding a lot of extra words, and there are many other options to tar, and you've left out making an archive, but yeah: -cf Create File -xf eXtract File th

You adding a lot of extra words, and there are many other options to tar, and you've left out making an archive, but yeah: -cf Create File -xf eXtract File then you have the adverb v, and the adjective z: -vczf Verbosely Create gZip File -vxzf Verbosely eXtract gZip File I find it difficult to remember the arguments mostly because I seldom use tar, not because the arguments are unintuitive or something.