It should be a crime to directly link XKCDs images without the corresponding page.
No no it’s this:
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Decide you’ve gotta use tar.
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man tar -
Guess-and-check the flags until it seems to work.
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Immediately forget the flags.
That was my case until I discovered that GNU tar has got a pretty decent online manual - it’s way better written than the manpage. I rarely forget the options nowadays even though I dont’ use tar that frequently.
As much as I also do step 4, to be honest I don’t see people use man anywhere near as much as they should. Whenever faced with the question “what are the arguments for doing xyz”, I immediately man it and just tell them - Practically everywhere you can execute a given command, you can also read full and comprehensive documentation, just look!
Those are straightforward; it’s the remaining 900 options that are confusing. I always need to look up --excludes and always get --directory wrong, somehow.
Why when explaining, giving examples of shell command are people so often providing shortened arguments. It makes it all seam like some random letters you have to remeber by heart. Instead of -x just write --extract. If in the end they endup using the tool so often they need to write it fast they’ll check the shortcuts.
Does every Linux command have options as words instead of single letters?
just now realizing that .tar files aren’t compressed by default, and that that’s the reason why it’s always .tar.gz
