| > Maybe you already understand all this Yes I do. Every single item. I just feel for the hapless student that is required to send a compressed archive of his work to the teacher, and is using tar for the first time. There's only one little exception: I didn't know GNU tar doesn't require the '-z' flag (which by the way means 'this is a gzip archive') when extracting tar.gz archive. Anyway, I bet my hat that the '-z' is required if you compress something and output the result to the standard output: there will be no '.gz' hint to help the tool magically understand you want it compressed. If you omit it, tar will likely not compress anything. The '-f' option is the most aggravating. Nobody uses tapes any more. Tar was doing the right thing, but no longer. -f should be dropped, or rendered optional, or replaced by '-o' for consistency with compilers… As it is, it's just ugly. > It feels to me though that when people have issues with something like the unix command line its because they just wanted to get something done and memorized an incantation to do it. There isn't anything wrong with that of course […] Actually there is. The users want to do something (usually a very common case such as compressing or decompressing an archive), then they have to memorise an arcane incantation. Yes, tar can do much more. Yes, the command line is powerful and flexible and more. This is Good. (Seriously, I miss my command line whenever I have to touch Windows.) On the other hand, some common cases are just not well handled, and it is full of idiosyncrasies that have nothing to do with the aforementioned benefits. When the user wants to decompress files, it should not be more complicated than 'decompress archive.tar.gz'. Though thanks to an uncle comment, I now know of the 'unp' tool, which works just like that: 'unp archive.tar.gz', and you're done. (And the man page is refreshingly short.) |