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.”
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
I’ll take my award in all ones please
At some point, I realized
tar xf
is enough for extracting a file, so that’s what I’m always using now.I just remember zxvf, but if I have to do anything else then extract a tar.gz we’re fucked.
If you can’t tar to a pipe into ssh to a remote host and untar into an arbitrary location there, are you really using Unix?
I had to pipe dd through gzip over SSH recently to locally image a disk on a cloud server. That was fun.
Useless Use Of dd
What the fuck lmao I didn’t know that was possible
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
A 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.
The post only calls for “a valid tar command”, not that it has to work for any specific circumstance.
I don’t remember the last time I had to worry about the compression. I simply run
tar xf myfile.tar.whatever
and it works every time.xaf
(extract a file) auto-detects the format.Extract Any File
Extract All Files
I still use that. 😅
That sounds a lot like Czech, “ze” means “from” if you translate it into English
Looks, not sounds. Ahoj!
tar --help
Exactly what I would have done !
This is the way
I wish more people knew about dtrx (Do The Right eXtraction).
I didn’t know about
-d
.explainshell.com to the rescue!
They meant the command dtrx, the combination of dtrx as parameters to tar make no sense. Extract AND append?
haha, ok thanks. So https://github.com/dtrx-py/dtrx
I’d initially assumed that it was a mnemonic but yes, listing and appending and extracting together is nonsensical, as tar notes:
tar: You may not specify more than one '-Acdtrux', '--delete' or '--test-label' option
Ayy Debian has been my main for like ten years. Dtrx is one of the ten things I apt immediately every time I have a re install
Or in this case, https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr
And it’s fast implementation, https://github.com/dbrgn/tealdeer
tar -tvf
is a favorite of mine.tar --help
is a valid commandMore of a request than a command, I’d have argued
I command you to show me the manual
For GNU
tar
it is, for any other version I would not be so sure. Especially when disabling an atomic bomb.I remember those 2 and thats all I need.
tar -extrakt ze file
tar -compress ze file
tar -extract -file
tar -compress -xz -file
tar -extract -any -file is easier, auto detect the compression based on filename.
I think GNU tar automatically detects the compression, making
-a
unnecessary in that case.And
-z
.tar -xf foo.tar.{gz,xz,zstd,...}
will work perfectly fine.Tar Xtract Ze Vucking File
Edit: apparently someone else already mentioned this, oops
Nope - it was Unix not Linux. The minus makes the command invalid on many Unix versions of tar (though most modern BSD versions allow it)
Gonna blow up then I guess
tar -xvf is the only one I know
And I think it was tar -cvf for creating .tar files?
The command that I can never get right the first time is
ln
. I always end up creating a dead link inside my target folder, even when I read the man page directly prior.tar xzvf file.tar.gz
I got it memorized after installing gentoo over and over again from stage 3 back in 2005Same, but it all goes to shit when I need to create an archive
tar -xzvf archive.tar.gz
eXtract Zhe Vucking File
Sorry, it was Solaris - you just blew it up (the minus is invalid on many Unix versions of tar)
Inadvertent oracle attack.
Oh come on!