Paul Cooper
April Kingbig middle finger to the universe, but especially to the colleague who made my bones hurt by pointing out that the `z` in `tar -xvzf` hasn’t been needed since version tar 1.15, released in 2004.
smartwatermelon 
@april surely not
Sean Gillies@april I'm going to keep using -z anyway. -xzf means, to me, with a bad French accent "extract zee file".
Hugo Slabbert ⚠️
Paul Zawada
Mathieu Comandon@april omg, it also works for 'J' (and probably 'j') too!
Evandro Pires Alves
Bill, organizer of stuff
facade@april ah god no, no!!!
jordan@april Been working with a lot of .tar.xz files and struggling with my muscle memory to leave it off :( :( :(
Blake Coverett@april Hate to break it to you, but the `-` hasn't been needed for much longer than that. The 80s anyway.
@blakecoverett I knew that but I use the dash out of spite due to its blatant un-UNIX-iness. :)
steelman@april Whether you use - or not you need -z (and other flags) when reading from stdin. @blakecoverett
Mike Rochefort 
@steelman @april @blakecoverett It's the one UX difference I wish would be rectified; I don't use the hyphen normally, but when curling and piping an online asset it always trips me up the auto-detection and hyphen-less syntax doesn't work.
@omenos If I were guessing, I'd say it may be hard(er) to make format detection code safe without using fseek(), which doesn't work for stdin.
> hyphen-less syntax doesn't work.
Why? Let me check. `cat ~/Download/terminus-font-4.49.1.tar.gz | tar -tz` works fine for me.
@steelman @april @blakecoverett Yeah, I'm not expecting it to be an easy or reasonably possible thing to support. It's just something I forget differs from time to time.
For piping, I was referring to needing to specify the hyphen for tar's parameters, rather than stdin itself. e.g. "tar xz" vs "tar -xz".
@omenos No problems noticed with `cat Pobrane/terminus-font-4.49.1.tar.gz | tar tz` either.
@april @blakecoverett
@april @blakecoverett
@steelman @april @blakecoverett Huh, interesting. I could have sworn I had errors before doing that. Will have to try again today. Maybe it was the lack of compression type... I don't remember, I'm still not fully awake 😅
Bruce G_NS@blakecoverett @april Dang it you all are making me feel ruddy ancient. Not that I’m not ancient but I was enjoying that delusion. Next you’ll tell me that I don’t need the -r for recursive zip file building
Christopher
Orc@april Sssh, don't say that too loudly or the FSF will loudly depreciate it.
Squash Follower@april Shoot, I'm still using zcat.
your idiot friend@april this is the rudest thing that has graced my timeline in a long time
joncamfield@april it may not be strictly required, but it’s still needed. By me. I need it there.
𝒪𝓃𝒶𝓊ℊ 𝒲𝒶𝓃𝓊@april and use -a on compression and not worry about the right option for compression program
amd
Dym Sohin@april 2004 was 19 years ago
Jason Levine@april What. The. Fuck. Good luck convincing my fingers and brainstem of that.
Les Orchard@lmorchard hope you’ll be there at our retirement home’s bingo tournament tonight
@april I'll go ink up my blotter
JoYo
systemd-jaded.timer
Gabriel Pettier@leftpaddotpy @JoYo @april @float13 you would assume so, but no, it's not needed either, if you use the `a` flag, see the man. :)
Gabriel Pettier (@[email protected])
@[email protected] @[email protected] yes, it's unnecessary, and even when creating an archive, you can use the `a` flag to autodetect format. $ tar acf directory{.tar.gz,} $ tar acf directory{.tar.bz2,} $ tar acf directory{.tar.xz,} $ file directory.* directory.tar.bz2: bzip2 compressed data, block size = 900k directory.tar.gz: gzip compressed data, from Unix, original size modulo 2^32 28272640 directory.tar.xz: XZ compressed data, checksum CRC64
@april in your defense, they took another 8-10 years or something to add it to the bsd versions. but it's now been in those too for years.
Leger-Felicite Snorlax
sam@april @lmorchard Nooooooooooooooooooo
Derick Rethans
DuncanWatson@april I have used a lot of non-gnu tar so I don't care April's colleague.
The Doctor
Michael Wyman@april great, I just aged 20 years after reading this post
Bartek Ogryczak@april does it auto-detect compression type? Does it mean that `-j` and `-J` are also unnecessary when extracting? (also, tar is a Terrible ARchive format, it should die already).
@bartek @april yes, it's unnecessary, and even when creating an archive, you can use the `a` flag to autodetect format.
$ tar acf directory{.tar.gz,}
$ tar acf directory{.tar.bz2,}
$ tar acf directory{.tar.xz,}
$ file directory.*
directory.tar.bz2: bzip2 compressed data, block size = 900k
directory.tar.gz: gzip compressed data, from Unix, original size modulo 2^32 28272640
directory.tar.xz: XZ compressed data, checksum CRC64
@tshirtman @april Nice.
Still, given that zip is an open format, and unlike tar has proper structure, with index, checksums, etc, I'd rather see it used more often.
It's already being used by so much of open-source as the basis of package format, yet so many still stick to tar.
Tim Frede@april 30 years, I ain't gonna stop now
Lightfighter@april then who/what is going to play the xylophone?
Dhavide AruliahWait, what?
I've been doing this "the old way" for almost 20 years and never noticed?
A pox upon your co-worker! Get out of my yard!
Daniel Lowe@april This was in direct response to a popular blog post pointing out how stupid it was that we had to specify it. I think it made Slashdot (Digg?) front page.
luciano@april no one will ever stop me from xtracting ze file verbosely
@april the '-' is not needed anymore, but i'm not going to lookup since when.
`tar xf filename`
edit: should have read the other comments, you knew that already.
Jessica D Dooley@april I... I type it every time 😐