I've memorized a total of two commands from decompressing things (`tar xfv $file` and `unzip $file`) and one for compressing (`tar cf $archive.tar $file1 $file2 $directory`) which seems to have done everything I've wanted for more than 20 years of unix usage. Is there something I'm missing out on? Sometimes, a `gunzip` or `7z` has been needed, but they are far apart that I can look it up each time. I'm not sure how I can save hours of time as non-tar or non-zip files is not something I often come across.

I just use dtrx: https://github.com/moonpyk/dtrx. That only does decompression, but that's generally good enough for me and supports basically everything (even more exotic stuff like Java JARs and DOCX, which are both ZIP archives under the hood).

If you're using GNU tar, there are four short options to specify compression/decompression: -Z for compress, -z for gzip, -j for bzip2 and -J for xz. Using long options, you can specify --compress, --gzip, --bzip2, --xz for the same, or even --lzip, --lzma, --lzop or --zstd for others.

That's exactly why people hate tar/UNIX generally. Tons of parameters that don't EVEN CLOSELY represent their purpose. For example: -j -J if noone told me, I'd assume they were "join" or "jump", or something. PS: zcvf zxfv, and, - surprise, surprise! - by default tar deletes source archive!

tar czvf "create ze vucking file"

tar xzvf "extract ze vucking files"

source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18909789