img title=“I don’t know what’s worse–the fact that after 15 years of using tar I still can’t keep the flags straight, or that after 15 years of technological advancement I’m still mucking with tar flags that were 15 years old when I started.”
A little trick I learned on here was to imagine yourself as a little evil man saying “Extract ze files!” in a German accent. Extract ze files >>> xzf.
I still use that. 😅
That sounds a lot like Czech, “ze” means “from” if you translate it into English
Looks, not sounds. Ahoj!
xaf
(extract a file) auto-detects the format.Extract Any File
Extract All Files
The post only calls for “a valid tar command”, not that it has to work for any specific circumstance.
I don’t remember the last time I had to worry about the compression. I simply run
tar xf myfile.tar.whatever
and it works every time.