this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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[โ€“] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It is "backwards" from some other commands


usually you run copy/rsync/link from source to destination, but with tar the destination (tarball) is specified before the source (directory/files).

That, and the flags not needing dashes always just throws me for a loop.

And the icing on the cake is that I don't use tar for tarring that often, so I lose all muscle memory (untaring a tgz or tar.bz2 is frequent enough that I can usually get that right at least...).

[โ€“] firelizzard@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I almost never create a tarball, so I have to look up the syntax for that. Which is as simple as man tar. But as far as extracting it almost couldn't be easier, tar xf <tarball> and call it a day. Or if you want to list the contents without extracting, tar tf <tarball>. Unless you're using an ancient version of tar, it will detect and handle whatever compression format you're using without you having to remember if you need z or J or whatever.