• blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.ukEnglish
    56·
    2 years ago

    I hope whoever thought -l should mean “check links” instead of list has a special place in Hell set aside for them.

    I have no idea what print a message if not all links are dumped even means.

  • Maoo [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    458·
    2 years ago

    No no it’s this:

    1. Decide you’ve gotta use tar.

    2. man tar

    3. Guess-and-check the flags until it seems to work.

    4. Immediately forget the flags.

    • bahmanm@lemmy.mlEnglish
      10·
      2 years ago

      That was my case until I discovered that GNU tar has got a pretty decent online manual - it’s way better written than the manpage. I rarely forget the options nowadays even though I dont’ use tar that frequently.

    • CarbonScored [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      As much as I also do step 4, to be honest I don’t see people use man anywhere near as much as they should. Whenever faced with the question “what are the arguments for doing xyz”, I immediately man it and just tell them - Practically everywhere you can execute a given command, you can also read full and comprehensive documentation, just look!

  • Zacryon@feddit.de
    30·
    2 years ago

    Ah yes, that’s the linux community as I know it. There is one thing someone wants to achieve and dozens of ways to do it. ;)

  • wvstolzing@lemmy.ml
    20·
    2 years ago

    Those are straightforward; it’s the remaining 900 options that are confusing. I always need to look up --excludes and always get --directory wrong, somehow.

  • aard@kyu.de
    19·
    2 years ago

    You also don’t need the dash for the short options.

    Also, if you’re compressing with bzip2 and have archives bigger than a few megabytes I’ll like you a lot more if you do it with --use-compress-prog=pbzip2

    • sebastiancarlos@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      311·
      2 years ago

      You also don’t need the dash for the short options.

      True, but I refuse to entertain such a non-standard option format. It’s already enough to tolerate find’s.

      • aard@kyu.de
        181·
        2 years ago

        Technically the notation with dashes is the non-standard one - the dash form is a GNU addition. A traditional tar on something like Solaris or HP-UX will throw an error if you try the dash notation.

    • killeronthecorner@lemmy.world
      111·
      2 years ago

      You also don’t need the dash for the short options.

      You know when you meet someone and you’re just like “oh boy, yeah, they’re evil. No humanity at all”

      • aard@kyu.de
        3·
        2 years ago

        Yes, but I’m asking you to use pbzip. bzip at best utilizes one core, both for packing and unpacking. pbzip uses as many cores as IO bandwith allows - with standard SATA SSDs that’s typically around 30.

        pbzip can only utilize multiple cores if the archive was created with it as well.

          • Programmer Belch@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            3·
            2 years ago

            I’ve searched for it and xz also doesn’t use multithreading by default, you can change the program tar uses to compress by passing the -I option. For xz using all possible CPU threads:

            tar -cv -I 'xz -6 -T0' -f archive.tar.xz [list of directories]

            The number indicates the compression ratio, the higher the number, the more compressed the archive will be but it will cost more in terms of memory and processing time

      • tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.ukEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        There’s nothing technically wrong with using xjf rather than xzf, but it’ll bite you if you ever use a non-linux platform as it’s a GNU extension. I’m not even sure busybox tar supports it.

  • miniu@programming.dev
    202·
    2 years ago

    Why when explaining, giving examples of shell command are people so often providing shortened arguments. It makes it all seam like some random letters you have to remeber by heart. Instead of -x just write --extract. If in the end they endup using the tool so often they need to write it fast they’ll check the shortcuts.

    • catacomb@beehaw.orgEnglish
      7·
      2 years ago

      I don’t even mind the shortened arguments too much, though it doesn’t help. It’s more that every example seems to smush them together into a string of letters.

      I would have found

      tar -x -f pics.tar ./pics

      to be clearer when I was learning. There’s plenty of commands which allow combining flags but every tar tutorial seems to do it from the beginning.

        • barsoap@lemm.ee
          5·
          2 years ago

          tar -xf is not really special combining short options isn’t uncommon.

          Where tar is nonstandard is that you can leave out the -, tar xf is actually how POSIX specifies it. And we’ve kinda come full circle on that one with many modern utilities using a command syntax, you can read tar xf as “tar extract file” just as you can read git pull as, well, “git pull”.

          If you want to see a standard command with truly non-standard syntax have a look at dd.

      • sonnenzeit@feddit.de
        6·
        2 years ago

        Many do as it’s considered good practice, but it’s not guaranteed, it just depends on the individual command (program). Usually you can use the --help option to see all the options, so for instance tar --help.

      • Zangoose@lemmy.one
        4·
        2 years ago

        Most commands will have expanded arguments started with 2 dashes that usually look like ‘–verbose-name-of-option’, they’re usually listed in the man page/documentation along with the abbreviated letter version

    • ExLisper@linux.communityEnglish
      33·
      2 years ago

      They are random letters you have to learn by hard. No one uses the long form. If someone just needs to use it one time they will copy the line from somewhere.

  • Gecko@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    2 years ago

    Or just use long-forms like

    tar --create --file pics.tar ./pics

    instead of

    tar -cf pics.tar ./pics

    or

    tar --extract --file pics.tar```
instead of

    tar -xf pics.tar

    
which is honestly way easier to remember... \^\^
  • gibson@sopuli.xyz
    171·
    2 years ago

    I don’t think tar is actually hard, we are just in the time where we externalize more information into resources such as Google. Its the same reason why younger people don’t remember routes by name or cardinal direction as much anymore.

    side note: $ tldr is much better than man for just getting common stuff done.

  • d00phy@lemmy.ml
    161·
    2 years ago

    The “-“ is often not necessary. I use it as a guide to see how long the person running tar has been using it.

    Example:

    tar -xf file.tar == tar xf file.tar

    • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      They are functionally flags though and uniletter flags should be preceded by a ‘-’, so I would still prefer to have the ‘-’ written, because it conforms with the standard.

    • superbirra@lemmy.worldBanned from community
      21·
      2 years ago

      yeah, you can also ditch that f

      tar c /etc/passwd > fu.tar

      tar t < fu.tar

      tar x < fu.tar

  • nucleative@lemmy.world
    13·
    2 years ago

    I have to Google for this everytime. What I can never remember is how to check whether I should put my tar.gz into the subfolder first or risk getting a thousand files sprayed into my homedir.

  • arc@lemm.ee
    11·
    2 years ago

    I know the basics off by heart. Not the hardest command syntax to learn all things considered.

    The most annoying would be the growing collection of “uber commands” which are much more of a pain in the ass - aws, systemctl, docker, kubectl, npm, cargo, etc. - the executable has potentially dozens of subcommands, each of which has dozens of parameters.

    • stilgar [he/him] @infosec.pubEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      These “uber commands” tend to be much better since they are more explorable with --help explanations and readable flags.

      Much better than the random jumble of characters you’re expected to have memorised for awk, sed, find et al.

      • arc@lemm.ee
        4·
        2 years ago

        Powershell is horrible all right. What annoys me is they alias ls, dir and other common commands onto commands which don’t act or behave in the same way at all. I just run bash or command prompt rather than deal with the bs of powershell.