img title=“I don’t know what’s worse–the fact that after 15 years of using tar I still can’t keep the flags straight, or that after 15 years of technological advancement I’m still mucking with tar flags that were 15 years old when I started.”
The command that I can never get right the first time is ln. I always end up creating a dead link inside my target folder, even when I read the man page directly prior.
I find it’s a lot easier if you think of it in term of tapes, which is what it was originally designed for (Tape ARchiver). It’s up there with makefiles for an actually really cool concept that nobody appreciates or even necessarily understands now.
(Well, I guess filesystems are the actual cool concept, from the historical perspective, but seeing the interplay with just tapes is the novel part to me)
Normally I would say view the man page (as a command). Though for some reason when making the thinnest distro possible, the OS team at my job got rid of man.
I know this is a meme, but I actually find tar fairly easy to remember.
tar -xf $archive is extract file
tar -czf $archive dir/ is create zipped (compressed) file and the positional arguments are the files to add to the archive.
And this is 99% of my usage. You can skip -f $archive to use stdin/stdout or use -C to change directory (weird name but logically tar always extracts to the current directory). There is also a flag to list which I always forget and lookup each time, but I list much less often. -v is useful for verbose.
Overall there are much harder commands to remember. find always gets me if I go beyond -name. ps, tree and ls (beyond -Al) always get me to open the man page.
There is also a flag to list which I always forget and lookup each time
That would be -t, which I tend to remember as “test”, as in testing to see what is inside the archive!
tealdeer is a great program to have installed for easily getting a breakdown of the flags of pretty much any CLI app that at least I can ever think of!
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