@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.