My question was about how "tar xvzf" should be called "untar". Your reply might still make sense (i.e. untar could automagically figure it out), but I was high

My question was about how "tar xvzf" should be called "untar". Your reply might still make sense (i.e. untar could automagically figure it out), but I was highlighting how tar/untar today also means (de)compressing that tar archive using many different compression formats.