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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.”

  • Krafty Kactus@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    100·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • chellomere@lemmy.world
      29·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • allywilson@sopuli.xyz
        21·
        8 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.

        😵

      • aard@kyu.de
        5·
        8 months ago

        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.

  • fubo@lemmy.world
    50·
    8 months ago

    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?

  • kevincox@lemmy.ml
    30·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • Russ@bitforged.spaceEnglish
      10·
      8 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!

    • Lunya \ she/it@iusearchlinux.fyi
      51·
      8 months ago

      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
      • Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        6·
        8 months ago

        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.

  • csm10495@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    21·
    8 months ago

    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.

  • SteveDinn@lemmy.caEnglish
    19·
    8 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.