3 ms·

No need for the ‘z’ :)

• majewsky 8y ago
  Yeah, tar is actually pretty simple these days. (At least GNU tar, don't know about other tars.) In 99.9% of cases you only need to know the following: tar caf $archive $file... to create tar xf $archive to extract "x" will automatically recognize the compression format, and "ca" will automatically infer the desired compression format from the extension in $archive, e.g. tar caf backup.tar.xz /home/user makes an xz-compressed tarball.
  • talkingtab 8y ago
    tar has trained us so well: "... tar is actually pretty simple these days"
  • dingaling 8y ago
    I still prefer to pipe through a compression program on principle. tar has no good reason to messing around with compression, per the Unix single-function philosophy.
    • TremendousJudge 8y ago
      to people who grew up with archive programs, "making all of this into a single file" and "compressing all of this" is the same thing; requiring two commands is counterintuitive
• craigds 8y ago
  You need it if you're processing stdin (curl ...file.tgz | tar xz)