3 ms·
Actually, the files are decompressed to the current directory, it's the just output of the verbose flag that goes to /dev/null. Which makes is even more sensele
by hobarrera 11y ago
Actually, the files are decompressed to the current directory, it's the just output of the verbose flag that goes to /dev/null. Which makes is even more senseless.
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoExactly. I've seen people who always do `tar xzvf` and have no idea removing the `v` is the correct way to make it not print the name of every file in the archive.
- merb 11y agoI use the -v switch since I want to see what I decompress, however I didn't knew that I could supress the z switch.
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoIsn't it better though to omit the -v switch and do `ls *` and/or `tree` afterwards? That gives you the same information but structured so it's much easier to understand.
- pwaring 11y agoThe advantage of -v is that you can see what is being extracted as it happens. This is useful if you have a tarball with thousands of small files, as otherwise it's hard to tell whether tar has got stuck or there are just a lot of files.
- bzbarsky 11y agoYou didn't use to be able to suppress the 'z' switch. You had to specify 'z' or 'j' depending on whether you wanted gzip or bzip2 decompression. It's a somewhat recent (sometime in the last 15 years, I think) change to "tar" to make it just detect the compression algorithm.