10
exerceo
173d

(Yet another rant on TAR commands.)
Whose idea was it to make TAR file listing "tar -t" and not "tar -l"?

How does it make sense? It goes against intuition.

It would have been more logical to make "-t" tarfile instead of "-f", and to make "-l" list.

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1168/

Comments
  • 2
    Perhaps the creators of tar hate Tarl Warwick, so they avoided "tar -l".

    Edit: Nah, impossible. tar was made before Tarl was born.
  • 4
    ask chatgpt

    -t -- Table-of-contents
  • 3
    What in tarnation are you on about?
  • 1
    @netikras A bot gives a better response than humans? Mind blown.
  • 0
    @exerceo you can use --list as well as -t
  • 1
    @exerceo I mean, if you treat chatgpt as an internet-based encyclopedia, as a search engine, it's a rather handy tool.

    As with all search engines, you have to double-check the results. But at least you get the clues to check for
  • 2
    tar -xvzf $file

    Everything else I need to Google.
  • 0
    My distro came with a couple of useful tar aliases in the default .bashrc

    alias tarnow='tar -acf '

    alias untar='tar -zxvf '
  • 0
    If I remember correctly, you don’t even need the -z option to untar. Also that -v option I find pretty useless too.
    I use ‘tar czf abc.tgz cute-chick.png’ and ‘tar xf abc.tgz’

    It’s only hard if you make it hard.
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