← Back to context

Comment by tomlx

3 years ago

I never got why people think using tar is hard. Specify your archive File with f. want to eXtract it? add a x. want to Create it? add a c. Want it to be Verbose while doing that? add a v. if it's gZiped add a z. Granted, j for bzip2, t for listing is less obvious, but with that it's about everything you need for everyday usage and that more than suffices to disarm that bomb.

2 comments

tomlx

Reply
KronisLV  3 years ago

Here's an example of better UX (subjectively):

  zip my-archive.zip my-directory
  unzip my-archive.zip

(disclaimer: zip/unzip won't be a reasonable alternative for all of the use cases of tar)

Good software doesn't beg that much explanation. And when it does, then either "--help" or just the command with no parameters e.g. "zip" or "unzip" should provide what's necessary. I don't believe that tar does that, but instead overwhelms the user, whereas "tar --usage" is overwhelming.

Here's another comment of mine which serves a precise example of why tar is problematic in my eyes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29339018

I don't feel like it follows the UNIX philosophy that well either, though i won't argue that it should be much smaller (because it is powerful, although someone might argue that), but that its commands should be grouped better.

That said, maybe things would be more tolerable if we used the full parameters instead of memorizing silly mnemonics, here's an excerpt from the linked comment:

  $ tar --verbose --create --gzip --file=new-archive.tar.gz ./files-i-want-to-archive