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

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

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 -h

I'll take my award in all ones please

tldr tar | head -n 1

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)

What if i use bing instead of google

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.

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.

7zz x *

tar -xvf is the only one I know

And I think it was tar -cvf for creating .tar files?

I always liked dtrx (do the right extraction)

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

tar -xzvf archive.tar.gz

eXtract Zhe Vucking File

tar --help