this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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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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[–] [email protected] 137 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Wouldn't tar --help suffice? Afaik, it returns exit code 0.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 7 months ago (5 children)

Depends. Is it GNU tar, BSD tar or some old school Unix tar?

Double hyphen "long options" are a typical GNU thing.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That’s why those commands have two?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

Yes, the terse Unix version, which needs to be supported for compatibility, and the more readable GNU long option

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[–] [email protected] 106 points 7 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 7 months ago

The post only calls for "a valid tar command", not that it has to work for any specific circumstance.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (2 children)

xaf (extract a file) auto-detects the format.

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 7 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 75 points 7 months ago (1 children)

tar -xzvf archive.tar.gz

eXtract Zhe Vucking File

[–] [email protected] 40 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Sorry, it was Solaris - you just blew it up (the minus is invalid on many Unix versions of tar)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago

Oh come on!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

Inadvertent oracle attack.

[–] [email protected] 72 points 7 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 29 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Then comes a .tar.bz2 file along and you're screwed. xtract je vucking file?

Pro tip: -z, -j are not needed by tar anymore since many years, tar will autodetect what compression was used if your distro is anything remotely modern.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago

Pro tip: -z, -j are not needed by tar anymore since many years, tar will autodetect what compression was used if your distro is anything remotely modern.

😵

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 50 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I had to pipe dd through gzip over SSH recently to locally image a disk on a cloud server. That was fun.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

What the fuck lmao I didn't know that was possible

[–] [email protected] 48 points 7 months ago (5 children)

I remember those 2 and thats all I need.
tar -extrakt ze file
tar -compress ze file

[–] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Tar Xtract Ze Vucking File

Edit: apparently someone else already mentioned this, oops

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (2 children)

tar -extract -any -file is easier, auto detect the compression based on filename.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 7 months ago (3 children)

tar --help is a valid command

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

For GNU tar it is, for any other version I would not be so sure. Especially when disabling an atomic bomb.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 7 months ago (2 children)

tar xvf somearchive.tar

Is that right? )= I'm scared I lost.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

user@server:~> tar xvf somearchive.tar

tar: somearchive.tar: Cannot open: No such file or directory

tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

[–] [email protected] 31 points 7 months ago

Scheiße...

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

Yep that's valid.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 7 months ago (1 children)

tar

Done. That's a valid command, no error code, nothing. KISS!

[–] [email protected] 51 points 7 months ago (4 children)

false

tar: You must specify one of the '-Acdtrux', '--delete' or '--test-label' options
Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information.
zsh: exit 2     tar
[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 30 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I know this is a meme, but I actually find tar fairly easy to remember.

tar -xf $archive is extract file

tar -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 and ls (beyond -Al) always get me to open the man page.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

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!

[–] [email protected] 30 points 7 months ago

Surely tar --help is a valid tar command, right?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 7 months ago (1 children)

man tar

“Yeah nvm, we’re fucked”

[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago
[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What if i use bing instead of google

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I find it's a lot easier if you think of it in term of tapes, which is what it was originally designed for (Tape ARchiver). It's up there with makefiles for an actually really cool concept that nobody appreciates or even necessarily understands now.

(Well, I guess filesystems are the actual cool concept, from the historical perspective, but seeing the interplay with just tapes is the novel part to me)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (1 children)

tar xzvf file.tar.gz I got it memorized after installing gentoo over and over again from stage 3 back in 2005

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

tar -tvf is a favorite of mine.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

At some point, I realized tar xf is enough for extracting a file, so that's what I'm always using now.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (5 children)

I wish more people knew about dtrx (Do The Right eXtraction).

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