Personally I never understood the problem with tar balls.

The only options you ever need are tar -x, tar -c (x for extract and c for create). tar -l if you wanna list, l for list.

That's really it, -v for verbose just like every other tool if you wish.

Examples:

  tar -c project | gzip > backup.tar.gz
  cat backup.tar.gz | gunzip | tar -l
  cat backup.tar.gz | gunzip | tar -x

You never need anything else for the 99% case.

▲ BeepInABox 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

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

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mkl 3 days ago | parent [-]

> tar -cf archive.tar.gz foo bar

This will create an uncompressed .tar with the wrong name. You need a z option to specify gzip.

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Intermernet 3 days ago | parent [-]

Apparently this is now automatically determined by the file name, but I still habitually add the flag. 30 years of muscle memory is hard to break!

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mkl 3 days ago | parent [-]

I tried it to check before making the comment. In Ubuntu 25.04 it does not automatically enable compression based on the filename. The automatic detection when extracting is based on file contents, not name.

	▲	BenjiWiebe 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		If you add a for auto, it will choose the right compression based on the file name. tar -caf foo.tar.xz foo Will be an xz compressed tarball.

▲ sdfsdfgsdgg 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

And you don't need to uncompress separately. tar will detect the correct compression algorithm and decompress on its own. No need for that gunzip intermediate step.

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porridgeraisin 4 days ago | parent [-]

> -l

Whoops, lol.

> on its own

Yes.. I'm aware, but that's more options, unnecessary too, just compose tools.

	▲	sdfsdfgsdgg 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's the thing. It’s not more options. During extraction it picks the right algorithm automatically, without you needing to pass another option.

▲ tombert 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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CamperBob2 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

What value does tar add over plain old zip? That's what annoys me about .tar files full of .gzs or .zips (or vice versa) -- why do people nest container formats for no reason at all?

I don't use tape, so I don't need a tape archive format.

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diggernet 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

A tar of gzip or zip files doesn't make sense. But gzipping or zipping a tar does.

Gzip only compresses a single file, so .tar.gz lets you bundle multiple files. You can do the same thing with zip, of course, but...

Zip compresses individual files separately in the container, ignoring redundancies between files. But .tar.gz (and .tar.zip, though I've rarely seen that combination) bundles the files together and then compresses them, so can get better compression than .zip alone.

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beagle3 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The zip directory itself is uncompressed, and if you have lots of small files with similar names, zipping the zip makes a huge difference. IIRC in the HVSC (C64 SID music archive), the outer zip used to save another 30%.

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fullstop 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

zip doesn't retain file ownership or permissions.

	▲	diggernet 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Good point. And if I remember right, tar allows longer paths than zip.

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dns_snek 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Plain old zip is tricky to parse correctly. If you search for them, you can probably find about a dozen rants about all the problems of working with ZIP files.

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aidenn0 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You for got the -z (or -a with a recent gnutar).

	▲	adastra22 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		It’s no longer needed. You can leave it out and it auto-detects the file format.

▲ drivers99 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

	▲	porridgeraisin 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Whoops, lol. Well that's unfortunate.

▲ themafia 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

You can skip a step in your pipeline.

▲ bigstrat2003 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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encom 4 days ago | parent [-]

It's very similar to every other CLI program, I really don't understand what kind of usability issue you're implying is unique to tar?

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mrguyorama 4 days ago | parent [-]

As has been clearly demonstrated in this very thread, why is "Please list what files are in this archive" the option "-t"?

Principle of least surprise and all that.

	▲	encom 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		And why is -v the short option for --invert-match in grep, when that's usually --verbose or --version in lots of other places. These idiosyncrasies are hardly unique to tar.

▲ jeanlucas 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

it was just a reference to xkcd#1168

I wasn't expecting the downvotes for an xkcd reference