This is riduculous. There's no difficulty writing tar commands. Just RTFM: man tar; I've written tar commands for 30 years: on day 0 I read the manual page, a

This is riduculous. There's no difficulty writing tar commands. Just RTFM: man tar; I've written tar commands for 30 years: on day 0 I read the manual page, and since day 1 I've been writing tar commands without any problem. (Same with find: first time a friend hacker dictated me a find command, next step I read the manual and since then I've been a happy find user). The secret of unix diffusion has been its man pages, full documentation of your local unix system, specific and always available on-line (even when the network is disconnected). Nowdays, with google or stackoverflow, you have the big problem that the documentation you get doesn't necessarily (probably never) match your specific installation, when you search for documentation, and that you get more fishes than fishing lessons.