@april surely not

@april I'm going to keep using -z anyway. -xzf means, to me, with a bad French accent "extract zee file".

@april are you actually for real? This has destroyed my entire understanding of the world

@april STOP THAT JEEEZ Ow.

@april omg, it also works for 'J' (and probably 'j') too!

@april dammit

@april Still need it for the czvf tho.

@april ah god no, no!!!

@april Been working with a lot of .tar.xz files and struggling with my muscle memory to leave it off :( :( :(

@april Hate to break it to you, but the `-` hasn't been needed for much longer than that. The 80s anyway.

@april Thats so much muscle memory. I have to look up EVERYTIME how to use bzip... :(

@april goddammit!

@april Sssh, don't say that too loudly or the FSF will loudly depreciate it.

@april Shoot, I'm still using zcat.

@april this is the rudest thing that has graced my timeline in a long time

@april ok, wow, but I'm going to retcon my continued use of `-z` (and `-j`) as being about keeping the commands consistent between extract and create mode.

@april @gsuberland I still use that, and will likely never stop

@april it may not be strictly required, but it’s still needed. By me. I need it there.

@april Yeah. I think I learned this around 2015 or so, and still manage to type z, J, etc on extraction 80% of the time.

@april and use -a on compression and not worry about the right option for compression program

@april 2004 was 19 years ago

@april huh I thought this was particular to GNU tar but I just checked and the BSDs have it too

@april What. The. Fuck. Good luck convincing my fingers and brainstem of that.

@april WAT

@april @float13 still needed to -c tho, right?

@april *presses z for respect

@april in your defense, they took another 8-10 years or something to add it to the bsd versions. but it's now been in those too for years.

@april WHAT

@april @lmorchard Nooooooooooooooooooo

@april TIL.

@april what.

@april@macaw.social I have used a lot of non-gnu tar so I don't care April's colleague.

@april ...

@april great, I just aged 20 years after reading this post

@april of course there’s an xkcd for that: https://m.xkcd.com/1168/

@april does it auto-detect compression type? Does it mean that `-j` and `-J` are also unnecessary when extracting? (also, tar is a Terrible ARchive format, it should die already).

@april 30 years, I ain't gonna stop now

@april then who/what is going to play the xylophone?

@april

Wait, what?

I've been doing this "the old way" for almost 20 years and never noticed?

A pox upon your co-worker! Get out of my yard!

@april This was in direct response to a popular blog post pointing out how stupid it was that we had to specify it. I think it made Slashdot (Digg?) front page.

@april no one will ever stop me from xtracting ze file verbosely

@april the '-' is not needed anymore, but i'm not going to lookup since when.

`tar xf filename`

edit: should have read the other comments, you knew that already.

@april@macaw.social er ... what? why? when? who?

@april I... I type it every time 😐

@april Surely 'z' is still needed when creating compressed tar files?

@april They will pry that z from my cold dead hands.

@april report them to HR.

@april What about jxvf?

@april IT’S ABOUT TRADITION OKAY 😭💀

@april I think it still needs the `z` if you pipe a stream into `tar` rather than giving it a filename. With a file, it can look at the file and see what it contains, but if you send it a stream it has problems.

@april I still do it LOL

@april Really? Haven't tar'd anything in a while but that sounds like crazy talk. Next you're gonna say `gzip -9` the 9 isn't necessary.

@april Sheet, man. Never needed that initial hyphen either

@april

@april common misconception. The z is for “—zoinks” and is needed to express the appropriate level of surprise at how well compressed the files were. Without it tar feels mightily under appreciated.

@april you needed a trigger warning on this.

@april stop attacking me

@april 😆 brutal.

@april what?! I still type it, too. But why would I bother to read the man page in the last 20 years?

@april@macaw.social <falls to dust like the CryptKeeper exposed to sunlight>

Muscle memory permanently encoded

@april WHAT?!

@april I still catch myself typing the z once in a while

@april What if I need the z so that the call to compress and the call to extract look similar and I don't have to remember a different set of flags? e.g. 'tar cvzpf'

@april what the fuck

@april that's just 4 years after I learned the command. LOL

@april @donmelton

omg what??

@april I think the z will save you a few microseconds (it expects gzip compression right away instead of trying to read an uncompressed stream and trying again with decompression turned on). So you can tell your colleague that you're just being efficient.

@april No way, that "z" stays in.

Not just because I'm old (Yep!), but I don't want to learn two ways of doing this whenever I potentially do something on an old Linux system that has been stuck in amber for the last 18 years.

@april At the risk of being remotely flipped off, the `-` isn't necessary either. This is [called](https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_section/Styles.html#Old-Options) the "old option style" so I guess there's no version to point to.

@april I refuse to let tar think less of me by omitting that information, we’ve built up too much rapport over the years to hold back like that

@april -xzvf forever!

@april WHAT?!

Also…less is more

@april well, shit ... now I guess I have break my fingers to forcibly purge the useless muscle memory needed for that one extra keystroke

@april
Next thing you're telling me is that I don't have to use v1440 with ARJ compression anymore and I bought all these floppies for nothing.

@april oh, they didn't mention bsdtar? untarring EVERY download on the fly directly from stdout?

not some, all

yes, that one too

yup, that one too

haven't tried myself, but probably it works for that one too

@april I love it. You don't need the v either, but that's more obvious. 😜

@april It's there for *documentation*. You put it there because you know you're dealing with a gzip'd tarball.

@april That's it, I'm going back to cpio.

@april Wait. It's not?

@april @pmbauer but if you write tar -xzvf instead it makes it more readable because you know it means “extract ze vucking files”

@april It will take me 20 more years to remove it from muscle memory.

@april I think it still has purpose. It's a quick way to assert that you are extracting/listing files from a gzipped tar. When that fails, you know you may have another issue (why wasn't this in gzip format??)

@april this is the way

@april I may have found a whole lotta people to follow

@april tar will never get the user uptake it needs until it addresses the options issue!

@april @lmorchard jesus

@april also the dash isn't needed... though i always use it too 😅

`tar xf` (or `xvf` if you want to be verbose) is all you need!

`tar caf foo.tar.gz` is all you need to create one too

@april Yeah, I still use -z out of habit. Weirdly, I recently learned tar supports xz decompression - that was a pleasant discovery.

@april This reminds me of the env var for the ps command I_WANT_A_BROKEN_PS

@april While you're at it, drop the v and watch it work faster.

@april wait what? 😱​

@april it is however needed when creating the archive if you want it compressed, so from an ergonomic standpoint IMO adding it doesn't really hurt and gives better consistency (x for extract, c for create, everything else stays the same).

@april I feel seen.

@april okay but then how am I supposed to remember to eXtract Zie Vucking Files

@april Way to ruin the morning. How about a content warning next time.😉

@april the "-" neither

@april
Omg I hate this! I hate this soo much!!! I want this knowledge out of my head RIGHT NOW!! 😭
@vaurora

@april @donmelton waaaaat

@april It hasn't? Oh well, I'm too set in my ways to change now!