the fear of missing out a better compression

tar -h

Edit: wtf… It’s actually tar -?. I’m so disappointed

tar eXtactZheVeckingFile

Me trying to decompress a .tar file

Joke’s on you, .tar isn’t compression

You don’t need the v, it just means verbose and lists the extracted files.

You may not, but I need it. Data anxiety is real.

You don’t need the z, it auto detects the compression

tar -xzf

(read with German accent:) extract the files

German here and no shit - that is how I remember that since the first time someone made that comment

Same. Also German btw 😄

That’s so good I wish I needed to memorize the command

z is for gzip archives only.

tar xf for eXtract the File

tar -uhhhmmmfuckfuckfuck

The Fish shell shows me just the past command with tar So I don’t need to remember strange flags

I use zsh and love the fish autocomplete so I use this:

https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions

Also have fzf for ctrl + r to fuzzy find previous commands.

I believe it comes with oh-my-zsh, just has to be enabled in plugins and itjustworks™

man tar

you never said I can’t run a command before it.

without looking, what’s the flag to push over ssh with compression

not compressed by default

That’s yet another great joke that GNU ruined.

Zip makes different tradeoffs. Its compression is basically the same as gz, but you wouldn’t know it from the file sizes.

Tar archives everything together, then compresses. The advantage is that there are more patterns available across all the files, so it can be compressed a lot more.

Zip compresses individual files, then archives. The individual files aren’t going to be compressed as much because they aren’t handling patterns between files. The advantages are that an error early in the file won’t propagate to all the other files after it, and you can read a file in the middle without decompressing everything before it.

Yeah that’s a rather important point that’s conveniently left out too often. I routinely extract individual files out of large archives. Pretty easy and quick with zip, painfully slow and inefficient with (most) tarballs.

A tar directory also preserves file permissions. And can preserve groups/ownership if needed.

Can you evaluate the directory tree of a tar without decompressing? Not sure if gzip/bzip2 preserve that.

Nowhere in here do you cover bzip, the subject of this meme. And tar does not compress.

It’s just a different layer of compression. Better than gzip generally, but the tradeoffs are exactly the same.

Well, yes. But your original comment has inaccuracies due to those 2 points.

Obligatory shilling for unar, I love that little fucker so much

Single command to handle uncompressing nearly all formats.
No obscure flags to remember, just unar <yourfile>
Makes sure output is always contained in a directory
Correctly handles weird japanese zip files with SHIFT-JIS filename encoding, even when standard unzip doesn’t

gonna start lovingly referring to good software tools as “little fuckers”

What weird Japanese zip files are you handling?

Voicebanks for Utau (free (as in beer, iirc) clone of Vocaloid) are primarily distributed as SHIFT-JIS encoded zips. For example, try downloading Yufu Sekka’s voicebank: http://sekkayufu.web.fc2.com/ . If I try to unzip the “full set” zip, it produces a folder called РсЙ╠ГЖГtТPУ╞Й╣ГtГЛГZГbГgБi111025Бj. But unar detects the encoding and properly extracts it as 雪歌ユフ単独音フルセット（111025). I’m sure there’s some flag you can pass to unzip to specify the encoding, but I like having unar handle it for me automatically.

Ah, that’s pretty cool. I’m not sure I know of that program. I do know a little vocaloid though, but I only really listen to 稲葉曇(Inabakumori).

The same thing with zip, just use “unzip <file>” right?

I’m an atools kinda person

Looks cool, I’ll check it out

7z is available for Linux as well (CLI only)

It is open-source too.

I know, but I’d say ppl on Linux tend to not use it.

When I was on windows I just used 7zip for everything. Multi core decompress is so much better than Microsoft’s slow single core nonsense from the 90s.

Small ~~dick~~ package kings/queens rise up.

Yeah, 7z is the clear winner.

It’s much slower to decompress than DEFLATE ZIP though

xz is quite slow though

There’s several levels you can use to trade off additional space for requiring more processing power. That being said, I hate xz and it still feels slow AF every time I use it.