short of verbatim names I can never remember the switches I need and it's basically impossible to tell if a particular regex is working fine and the files aren't there or the regex isn't working due to some feature or another not being supported due to dialects or escape characters or w/e. endlessly frustrating.
@icpmoles@climagic Modern tar are the easiest-to-use Unix programs, automatic format detection has been a supported feature since 10 years ago by GNU tar, and even libarchive's BSD tar supports it. tar -xf is almost the only command I use. Those obsolete tar tutorials are a tremendous waste of time.
@niconiconi@climagic I have to admit that I'm too spoiled by the unzip syntax and that always going with the first google result™ doesn't help with the memorization :blobsweats:
@icpmoles@climagic Fun fact: the tar -xf trick is even more powerful using bsdtar since bsdtar is a frontend of libarchive, so it even works for zip, 7z, ISO, cpio, and RAR (with limitation, e.g. custom filter not supported due to missing RAR virtual machine implementation). bsdtar -xf does almost everything. Unfortunately "modern" tech like that will never appear in those Unix 101 tutorials...
@niconiconi@climagic@icpmoles Even heirloom tar has format detection for bzip2 and gzip (checkzip function).
And copyright notices indicates last modification in 2003, so most of the people reading about how to use tar were likely born after tar got auto-detection.
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