Comment by bigstrat2003
1 day ago
The problem is it's very non-obvious and thus is unnecessarily hard to learn. Yes, once you learn the incantations they will serve you forever. But sit a newbie down in front of a shell and ask them to extract a file, and they struggle because the interface is unnecessarily hard to learn.
It's very similar to every other CLI program, I really don't understand what kind of usability issue you're implying is unique to tar?
As has been clearly demonstrated in this very thread, why is "Please list what files are in this archive" the option "-t"?
Principle of least surprise and all that.
And why is -v the short option for --invert-match in grep, when that's usually --verbose or --version in lots of other places. These idiosyncrasies are hardly unique to tar.