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.”
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Wouldn’t tar --help suffice? Afaik, it returns exit code 0.
Depends. Is it GNU tar, BSD tar or some old school Unix tar?
Double hyphen “long options” are a typical GNU thing.
tar -h?
Ugh. Bsdtar:
But it has --help too.
That’s why those commands have two?
Yes, the terse Unix version, which needs to be supported for compatibility, and the more readable GNU long option