[bigstrat2003]

The problem is it's very non-obvious and thus is unnecessarily hard to learn. Yes, once you learn the incantations they will serve you forever. But sit a newbie down in front of a shell and ask them to extract a file, and they struggle because the interface is unnecessarily hard to learn.

[encom]

It's very similar to every other CLI program, I really don't understand what kind of usability issue you're implying is unique to tar?

[mrguyorama]

As has been clearly demonstrated in this very thread, why is "Please list what files are in this archive" the option "-t"?

Principle of least surprise and all that.

[encom]

And why is -v the short option for --invert-match in grep, when that's usually --verbose or --version in lots of other places. These idiosyncrasies are hardly unique to tar.