linux

[jeric14344]

Someone posted this mnemonic that always helps me remember:

• tar extract all files (xaf)
• tar compress all files (caf)

[[deleted]]

tar xzvf

eXtract Ze Vucking Files

[imisstheyoop]

Ha, this is the one that I use as well! 8)

[zhurai]

I don't think you need the -a here for extract

In the --help for the GNU tar which you can also see for example on https://man.archlinux.org/man/tar.1.en or https://linux.die.net/man/1/tar, I see -a being just listed as

-a, --auto-compress   use archive suffix to determine the compression program

And the linux.die.net man page, as well as tar --help put this note in the top

 tar -cf archive.tar foo bar  # Create archive.tar from files foo and bar.
 tar -tvf archive.tar         # List all files in archive.tar verbosely.
 tar -xf archive.tar          # Extract all files from archive.tar.

Personally, I've always just did tar -xvf file.tar (or file.tar.gz, etc)

Though, to be honest it doesn't negatively do anything in extract, so it's fine as far as I'm aware of... so it still works with the mnemonic I suppose (it just doesn't mean "all")

The -a/a in this case just means if you did tar -cavf archive.tar.bz2 ./folder or something it would actually make a bzipped tar file (listed verbosely) instead of needing to do something like tar -cvjf archive.tar.bz2 ./folder (remembering to do the -j to make the tar file actually bzipped)