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A comment on Um – Create your own man pages so you can remember how to do stuff. Parent comment

Re:Um – Create your own man pages so you can remember how to... by majewsky on Monday August 20, 2018 @05:22AM (#17798615)
Yeah, tar is actually pretty simple these days. (At least GNU tar, don't know about other tars.) In 99.9% of cases you only need to know the following:

  tar caf $archive $file...      to create
  tar xf $archive                to extract
"x" will automatically recognize the compression format, and "ca" will automatically infer the desired compression format from the extension in $archive, e.g.

  tar caf backup.tar.xz /home/user
makes an xz-compressed tarball.
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Re:Um – Create your own man pages so you can remember how to... by dingaling on Monday August 20, 2018 @09:28AM (#17799697)
I still prefer to pipe through a compression program on principle. tar has no good reason to messing around with compression, per the Unix single-function philosophy.
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Re:Um – Create your own man pages so you can remember how to... by TremendousJudge on Monday August 20, 2018 @10:08AM (#17799973)
to people who grew up with archive programs, "making all of this into a single file" and "compressing all of this" is the same thing; requiring two commands is counterintuitive
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Re:Um – Create your own man pages so you can remember how to... by talkingtab on Monday August 20, 2018 @08:55AM (#17799516)
tar has trained us so well: "... tar is actually pretty simple these days"
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