Was trying to extract a totally legit copy of Skate 3 I downloaded today to play on my Steam Deck
tar --help
tar --help
I always remember that it’s eXtract Ze File,
tar -xzf
… But I’ll be honest, I’ve not used it in years and yearstar --help
In the true spirit of UNIX, it’s
tar -h
It’s
tar --help
on my system 💥
You just killed us all by putting a space between the dashes
Fuckin autocorrect was the death of us all.
tar --version
You’re welcome
I’d have gone with
tar --help
It’s insane that this isn’t consistent.
Any combination of
-h
,-?
and--help
exists between tools (from 0 to all 3 of them)Never seen
-?
, it’s either-h
,--help
, or-help
for programs that just want to be different.One example for it is … tar!
tar -cvzf /etc/
Edit: we’re dead :(
I do
tax -xvf filename
tax
Boom.
I like the way you pointed that out lmao
… aaaaaand you’ve killed us all.
tar -xzf stands for tar eXtract Ze Filez
Now do a standard
pax
command.tar --extract --file file.tar.gz
Tar -xvf
tar -h
tar: You must specify one of the '-Acdtrux', '--delete' or '--test-label' options Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information.
Just
tar
, no arguments. Does nothing, still a valid command, no?Exit code 2 -> boom
tar -czvf tar_name.tar.gz ./
I even read this aloud in my head as “CREATE ZE VUCKING FILE” in a particularly bad German accent same as over 20 years ago when a friend I worked for drilled it in my head.
Read it in tf2 medics voice
tar -xzvf file.tar
That’s what I had in mind too. Tar’s arguments are really intuitive.
x - eXtract
z - use gZip
v - Verbose
f - File (requires the path as an argument)
tar -xvf or we all kill
shouldnt there be a filename argument ?
I definitely still killed us all, but at the same time how are you supposed to know any of the filenames if none are given from the comic? I guess my real answer is to ‘tar -xvf’ then hit tab with hopes of decent file completion functionality lol
tar -czf $(ls | head -n1)
if we dont trust globsor run
find
in/bin
or something
Yes. However, if you had skipped the -f, it would have been valid. Without the filename argument, it assumes it should extract from the tape drive (TAR = Tape ARchive). The tape device is probably something like /dev/rmt0, but you don’t need to specify that. Using the -f is technically an exception which means “instead of extracting from the tape like you’d normally do, pretend that this file is the tape device instead.”
GNU tar, at least a modern one, that is the one that happens to come with my system, won’t try to read from
/dev
but stdin and then complain that it’s a terminal and refuse.Quoth POSIX on the
f
flag:Use the first file operand […] as the name of the archive instead of the system-dependent default.
That is GNU is compliant, here, the default is system-dependent.
f -
is required to be stdin, though, so you canbunzip2 foo.tar.bz2 | tar xf -
or such in a portable manner, don’t have to rely on tar having az
option (which is nonstandard) or it auto-detecting compression (even more nonstandard). What is not standard either istar -x
: Tar doesn’t take leading hyphens. Tar is one of those programs so old its command line syntax got standardised before command line syntax standards were established. OTOH it’s not nearly as bad asdd
, you can interpret how tar does things in the same way asgit pull
: It’s a subcommand, not a flag.“one of those programs so old its…syntax got standardized before command line syntax standards were established.” –This is wild to learn, but also confusing. How does tar not take leading hyphens, but I’ve only ever used it as such without error of any kind? Not even bragging I’ve been doing that for 10+ years too lol
Hmm. Actually you prompted me to dig a bit deeper: tar goes all the back to Version 7 UNIX, 1979, but the command line syntax is shared with tap, included in Version 1, man page dated to 1971-11-03. Development of C started 1972. Might’ve been written in B, you’d have to unearth a source archive I bet it’s around somewhere. But anyway if you look through the other Version 1 commands a lot of them don’t take hyphen commands,
ls
does, e.g.rm
doesn’t on account of only taking file names as arguments.dd
is actually younger, Version 5, 1974, the syntax apparantly comes from IBM’s JCL.Admittedly, that’s all before my time.
Both BSD and GNU tar take hyphens, I don’t really have any experience with anything else but a short stint with Solaris in the early 2000s (very emphatically before Sun got gobbled up by Oracle) and I don’t remember hyphens tripping me up. Much unlike
killall
. And I’m apparently not alone in that.