Wednesday 7 March 2018

Untar, ungz, gz, tar - how do you remember all the useful options?


I am pretty sure I am not the only one with the following problem: every time I need to uncompress a file in *nix I can't remember all the switches, and end up googling it, which is surprizing considering how often I need to do this.


Do you have a good compression cheat sheet? Or how about a mnemonic for all those nasty switches in tar?


I am making this article a wiki so that we can create a nice cheat sheet here.


Oh, and about man pages: is there's one thing they are not helpful for, it's for figuring out how to uncompress a file.



Answer



Or how about using the shell with advanced completion capabilities (like zsh or fresh versions of bash) which will complete the options for you, with comprehensive help? :))


Regarding tar: just look at the "qwerty" keyboard. There are letters "zxcvf" next to each other. You need either "tar czvf file.tar.gz files" or "tar xzvf file.tar.gz".


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