I used tar/unzip for decades I think, before moving to 7z which handles all formats I throw at it, and have the same switch for when you want to decompress into a specific directory, instead of having to remember which one of tar and unzip uses -d, and which one uses -C.

"also always extracts into a subdir" sounds like a nice feature though, thanks for sharing another alternative!

> tar xzf foobar.tgz

You don't need the z, as xf will detect which compression was used, if any.

Creating is no harder, just use c for create instead, and specify z for gzip compression:

  tar czf archive.tar.gz [filename(s)]

  tar tf archive.tar.gz

For anyone curious, unless you are running a 'tar' binary from the stone ages, just skip the gunzip and cat invocations. Replace .gz with .xz or other well known file ending for different compression.

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

> tar -l if you wanna list, l for list.

Surely you mean -t if you wanna list, t for lisT.

l is for check-Links.

     -l, --check-links
             (c and r modes only) Issue a warning message unless all links to each file are archived.

Yeah I never really understood why people complain about tar; 99% of what you need from it is just `tar -xvf blah.tar.gz`.

Except it's tar -t to list, not -l

    gzip -dc backup.tar.gz | tar -x

The problem is it's very non-obvious and thus is unnecessarily hard to learn. Yes, once you learn the incantations they will serve you forever. But sit a newbie down in front of a shell and ask them to extract a file, and they struggle because the interface is unnecessarily hard to learn.

it was just a reference to xkcd#1168

I wasn't expecting the downvotes for an xkcd reference

cpio is not that hard.

A common use case is:

  $ cpio -pdumv args 

  $ man cpio 

Copy

Cpio supports a third type of operation which copies files. It is initiated with the pass-through option flag (p). This mode combines the copy-out and copy-in steps without actually creating any file archive. In this mode, cpio reads path names on standard input like the copy-out operation, but instead of creating an archive, it recreates the directories and files at a different location in the file system, as specified by the path given as a command line argument.

This example copies the directory tree starting at the current directory to another path new-path in the file system, preserving files modification times (flag m), creating directories as needed (d), replacing any existing files unconditionally (u), while producing a progress listing on standard output (v):

$ find . -depth -print | cpio -p -dumv new-path