[anotherhue]

Questionably coding, but I always loved this IRC snippet:

<sdmkun> tar -xzf merc.tgz what the fuck

<sdmkun> how the fuck do you people remember this shit

<bucketmouse> just think with a german accent

<bucketmouse> XTRACT ZE FILES

[belovedeagle]

I really don't see what the big deal is with tar. Everyone seems to hate it. Probably because exactly one of those flags is necessary: zcat merc.tgz | tar -x

[anotherhue]

I quite like it, and have almost a singalong bit for the meaning attached to each character I add to a long tar command

tar - [create] [verbosely] [a g/bzip'd compressed] [file named] foo.tgz (from) input_dir

tar -cvzf foo.tgz input_dir

Your version doesn't seem as 'fun', I guess zcat and PIPE are just hard to rhyme along to.

[print]

Don't memorize. Use unp:

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/unp

[ANTSANTS]

Or dtrx:

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/dtrx