img title=“I don’t know what’s worse–the fact that after 15 years of using tar I still can’t keep the flags straight, or that after 15 years of technological advancement I’m still mucking with tar flags that were 15 years old when I started.”
tar xzvf file.tar.gz
I got it memorized after installing gentoo over and over again from stage 3 back in 2005A little trick I learned on here was to imagine yourself as a little evil man saying “Extract ze files!” in a German accent. Extract ze files >>> xzf.
Only works for tar.gz. Remember there’s also tar.xz, tar.bz, tar.bz2 and half have their own extractor flag. FUN. It’s usually J.
Wouldn’t tar --help suffice? Afaik, it returns exit code 0.
Normally I would say view the man page (as a command). Though for some reason when making the thinnest distro possible, the OS team at my job got rid of man.
Wtf man.
man wtf
I know this is a meme, but I actually find
tar
fairly easy to remember.tar -xf $archive
is extract filetar -czf $archive dir/
is create zipped (compressed) file and the positional arguments are the files to add to the archive.And this is 99% of my usage. You can skip
-f $archive
to use stdin/stdout or use-C
to change directory (weird name but logically tar always extracts to the current directory). There is also a flag to list which I always forget and lookup each time, but I list much less often.-v
is useful for verbose.Overall there are much harder commands to remember.
find
always gets me if I go beyond-name
.ps
,tree
andls
(beyond-Al
) always get me to open the man page.There is also a flag to list which I always forget and lookup each time
That would be
-t
, which I tend to remember as “test”, as in testing to see what is inside the archive!tealdeer is a great program to have installed for easily getting a breakdown of the flags of pretty much any CLI app that at least I can ever think of!