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Comment by LittlePeter | Hacker News Reader

Relevant xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/1168/

That's something I never understood. I learned tar -xvf young, and that's the only command I've ever used, and it works every time.

I interpreted the comic as meaning not any old tar command line, but a command line for a specific intended purpose. I had a job interview once with a test consisting of a whole list of 20 unix questions, one of which was "you need to do x, y and z in tar, what's the command line?". I got about 5 of them, but spent the 5 minutes critiquing the test and suggesting ways to improve it. I got the job. Apparently my 5 answers were the best anybody got anyway.

That's interesting, I always interpreted it as "enter any valid tar command".

That's the most obvious interpretation, but it doesn't really make much sense. At the end of the day, I suppose it's just a joke that tar command line arguments are bizarre and arcane.

tar --version

tar -czf ./file.tgz ./*

edit: i do hope that is correct without checking :-)

So the dash in `-czf` if optional? Which reminds me: why does ps have two sets of options again?

Don't laugh, it's actually three sets of options now:

- UNIX options, which may be grouped and must be preceded by a dash.

- BSD options, which may be grouped and must not be used with a dash.

- GNU long options, which are preceded by two dashes.

Reference: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/ps.1.html

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