i feel a certain kinship with Gandalf when he is trying everything he can think of to guess the password to the doors of moria. But for me its trying to get xzf in the right order with tar
@kstatz12 I THINK the important thing is that f is last, followed by the file. But even if that's wrong, I stick to "${compression}${action}${source}"... a mnemonic I picked up in the bz2 days when the compression flag was j.
@kstatz12 Yeah, I confess that my preferred order of (z|j)xf is learned and by now cargo-culted.
I can't speak for every tar impl out there. But IME (mostly BSD and Linux), z/j/x/c are generally position-independent. f just needs to come last in any flag-sequence because it's argument is the name of the archive. Otherwise you get weird errors like "x is not a valid archive" or similar.
@kstatz12 This is, of course, exacerbated by bsdtar and gnutar only supporting the dash-less flags for backwards compat reasons.
And the new flag syntax they both use exhibits the same "so similar you might think they're the same across platforms until you're proven wrong at a really inconvenient time" behavior of cross-platform tooling we've come to know and love.
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