> There is absolutely no reason why, if you provide tar a single .tar or .tar.gz with no other parameters, it doesn’t just say “ok this is a tar/gzip file and y

> There is absolutely no reason why, if you provide tar a single .tar or .tar.gz with no other parameters, it doesn’t just say “ok this is a tar/gzip file and you probably want to extract it”. The default behaviour is being held back from backwards compatibility allowing tar options to be passed as arguments (e.g. `tar xzvf foo.tar` functions the same as `tar -xzvf foo.tar`) though the program could just check if the argument is a valid path to a tar file. While we're at it though, the most annoying aspect of `tar` has got to be the requiring the `-f` option. I don't see why it's required instead of just taking the first file passed as an argument as the input/output tar file.