Comment by jeanlucas
Comment by jeanlucas a day ago
nope, that would be handling tar balls
ffmpeg right after
Comment by jeanlucas a day ago
nope, that would be handling tar balls
ffmpeg right after
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.gzPersonally 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
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.gzApparently 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!
> 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.
> -l
Whoops, lol.
> on its own
Yes.. I'm aware, but that's more options, unnecessary too, just compose tools.
That's the thing. It’s not more options. During extraction it picks the right algorithm automatically, without you needing to pass another option.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tough crowd.
fwiw, `tar xzf foobar.tgz` = "_x_tract _z_e _f_iles!" has been burned into my brain. It's "extract the files" spoken in a Dr. Strangelove German accent
Better still, I recently discovered `dtrx` (https://github.com/dtrx-py/dtrx) and it's great if you have the ability to install it on the host. It calls the right commands and also always extracts into a subdir, so no more tar-bombs.
If you want to create a tar, I'm sorry but you're on your own.