tar is usually smart enough to figure that .tar.gz is a compressed archive, so tar xvf suffices.
Moreover, .tar.xz archives are much more common nowadays, and the flag to tell tar to use xz decompression is J. Yes, uppercase J I shit you not, because all other letters of alphabet were already taken. The next commandline option added to tar is going to be a Unicode emoji symbol.
i always forgot about -J so i got used to writing tar --xz -cvf archive.tar.xz file1 file2… instead. it’s a bit more explicit and i’ll never have to hunt for the same flag in the man page again.
taris usually smart enough to figure that.tar.gzis a compressed archive, sotar xvfsuffices.Moreover,
.tar.xzarchives are much more common nowadays, and the flag to telltarto usexzdecompression isJ. Yes, uppercaseJI shit you not, because all other letters of alphabet were already taken. The next commandline option added totaris going to be a Unicode emoji symbol.i always forgot about
-Jso i got used to writingtar --xz -cvf archive.tar.xz file1 file2…instead. it’s a bit more explicit and i’ll never have to hunt for the same flag in the man page again.tar 🤏🗨️👉 archive files
The flag to extract .bz2 files is ‘j’. Not confusing at all.
Burrows–Wheeler algorithm or block-compression algorithm, the bzip2 file compression program was developed by Julian Seward.
Ah yes, totally makes sense.
XZ Utils started as a Unix port of Igor Pavlov’s LZMA (Lempel–Ziv–Markov) algorithm, by Lasse Collin, and then by the Tukaani Project.
So apparently the uppercase
Jstands for “that guy who made a better compression algorithm than Julian”.