On Mon, Feb 18, 2002 at 08:17:58AM -0600, Dan Drake wrote: > Whose bright idea was it to have `j' be the option for handling bzipped > tarballs? And whose not-very-bright-at-all idea was it to *change* that > to `y'? My Debian unstable system has "j tar", the math department has > "y tar". It drives me nuts! You could always use --bzip2 instead. > Didn't they realize that "tar zxvf" is deeply embedded into the > subconscious of millions of geeks like myself? That's always been `tar xzvf` to me. Command first, options second. i.e. x is the command (extract). > It seems like it wouldn't be difficult to extend the `z' option to > handle bzip2 archives, by simply looking at the file's extensions. Or > looking at the first bytes of the file and recognizing the binary > formats. It doesn't seem like it would be hard to do. Why hasn't anybody > done that yet? How do you determine which way to compress an archive when you're creating the archive? KISS! I'm glad UNIX utilities don't bend for the lazy, stupid, and stubborn users. RTFM! Nate who just had to add some flames to the rant.