So does tar. In fact, tar's dash-less flag support ("tar xvfz") is probably an artefact of the fact that in Unix v1 they hadn't come up with dashed flags, and "

So does tar. In fact, tar's dash-less flag support ("tar xvfz") is probably an artefact of the fact that in Unix v1 they hadn't come up with dashed flags, and "tar" appears to have been a successor to (or modelled after) "tp" which was a successor to "tap" which was in Unix v1 and had roughly the same flag layout.