The file name's position is not magical; it's linked to the -f flag. tar -c [files...] -f archive.tar The thing is, for both basic compressing and decompr

The file name's position is not magical; it's linked to the -f flag. tar -c [files...] -f archive.tar The thing is, for both basic compressing and decompressing you don't actually have to memorize all that much: tar xf archive.tar.gz # to uncompress tar caf archive.tar.ext [files...] # to compress (One could argue that for symmetry you might want to use xaf instead of xf.)