Personally a fan of '--verbose' to be honest. It's clear. "grep -v" anyone?

Particularly in this case, because `-v` sometimes means "print out the version number".

That's why they mentioned `grep -v`. Go look it up. It doesn't mean verbose OR version.

Doubt you'd be printing out a version number in a shell script though.

You may want to compare a version number of a command to make sure it's bigger than (or equal to) the minimum version required by your script, though.

>-v, --invert-match

> Selected lines are those not matching any of the specified patterns.

For the lazy.

Edit: I don't know hackernews formatting and I'm among the lazy, so... Marked as "won't fix".

Of all the options, it is so fitting and proper to use the long form for —-verbose.

It shows you the percentage reduction in size.

It's rare that I'd use it in a script. Perhaps I'd use it for a script whose main purpose is creating an archive to be widely distributed. Then the info might be of interest to the script's user.

But your comment brings up a good point about the difficulty of deciding what short flags truly are widely known. I assumed anyone who uses gzip regularly would know "-v", but maybe that isn't true.

It's useful when debugging your artifacts. It's a nice shortcut for adding a `find` after the `tar` invocation. Outside of debugging I've never seen the gzip/tar verbose output as anything other than clutter.

Pretty much just to make sure you're not wasting your time with the gzip.

But I also don't use gzip much these days. pbzip2 is a drop in replacement that is faster and compresses better.