Programmer Humor @lemmy.ml Cows Look Like Maps @sh.itjust.works 8 mo. ago

tar -vczfx123 ought to do it

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."

96 comments

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.
  
  That’s why those commands have two?
  
  tar -h?
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.
  
  xaf (extract a file) auto-detects the format.
  
  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.
- That sounds a lot like Czech, "ze" means "from" if you translate it into English
  
  Looks, not sounds. Ahoj!
- I still use that. 😅
tar --help
- Exactly what I would have done !
- This is the way
xtract ze vucking file
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  😵
  
  You still might want to do something like alias pbtar='tar --use-compress-prog=pbzip2 to easily use pbzip2 - unless you have an ancient system that'll speed things up significantly. And even if you don't it'd be nice to use it for creation - to utilize more than one core the archive needs to be created for parallel extraction.
  
  Yeah I usually just do xf. 🤷‍♂️
- v is just verbose, right?
  
  Yep.
- I'm so proud of me when I remember this. Hackerman!
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)
  
  Oh come on!
  
  Inadvertent oracle attack.
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
I remember those 2 and thats all I need.
tar -extrakt ze file
tar -compress ze file
- Tar Xtract Ze Vucking File
  
  Edit: apparently someone else already mentioned this, oops
- 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.
- 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 -extract -file
  
  tar -compress -xz -file
tar --help is a valid command
- For GNU tar it is, for any other version I would not be so sure. Especially when disabling an atomic bomb.
- More of a request than a command, I'd have argued
  
  I command you to show me the manual
tar xvf somearchive.tar

Is that right? )= I'm scared I lost.
- user@server:~> tar xvf somearchive.tar
  
  tar: somearchive.tar: Cannot open: No such file or directory
  
  tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
  
  Scheiße...
- Yep that's valid.
Surely tar --help is a valid tar command, right?
tar

Done. That's a valid command, no error code, nothing. KISS!
- 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
  
  💥
  
  OK now I have to escape to really smart assery and assume that's what I meant the whole time ;)
  
  Edit code 2 describes something that went wrong - but that something telling you that it went wrong was the tar binary which therefor most have been valid to evaluate that!
  
  Under no circumstances did I assume that the hint towards help itself would've been an exit code 0, no sir!
  
  To be honest: if I'd designed that bomb it would've exploded in my face for trying to be too clever.
  
  tar --help
  
  tar --help
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.
- 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!
man tar

“Yeah nvm, we’re fucked”
- Permanently Deleted
  
  Haha yeah that was my second comment on this post
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
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 2005
- Same, but it all goes to shit when I need to create an archive
What if i use bing instead of google
- straight to hell.
  
  To the boiler room of hell. Allll the way down.
  
  I think they're already there though
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)
you wouldn’t tarball a bomb
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?
- 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
At some point, I realized tar xf is enough for extracting a file, so that's what I'm always using now.
tar -tvf is a favorite of mine.
tar -cvf CowsLookLikeMaps.tar CowsLookLikeMaps
I just remember zxvf, but if I have to do anything else then extract a tar.gz we’re fucked.
Yeah tar is easy. Regex on the other hand..
- I can remember regex, but I need to check tar almost every time.
- Nothing a .* can't solve
- Regex, the write only language.
- Oh jeez, I use regex at least 2-3 times a week. It's really not too bad for simple stuff and doing basic search and replace operations in text editors
tldr tar | head -n 1
tar -xvf is the only one I know

And I think it was tar -cvf for creating .tar files?
7zz x *
- Or just double click.
Btw, GNU tar has long options.
I always liked dtrx (do the right extraction)
tar -h

I'll take my award in all ones please

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