You 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 somewh

You 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.