You're still missing the point. GitHub repos can be downloaded as a zip, because the zip file extension is easily compatible on all major operating systems.

I'm not usually one to post these, but I can't help it in this care:

https://xkcd.com/1168/

tar zxvf! For tar.gz. Never, ever understood why the tar command can't just read the extension and determine the required long list of options needed for successful extraction. Whether I can remember tar xvjpf (for tar.bz2 files) depends on many things, not sure which. To be honest, I like it when I hit a .zip, I can just type "unzip x"...

Nice xkcd :)

All I ever need to remember:

    atool -x archive.{zip,jar,rar,cab,deb,rpm,tar,tar.{gz,Z,bz2,xz}}

(list of supported formats is not complete)

With a simple alias, it isn't even necessary to remember the -x

    alias xx="atool -x"

This also protects you from badly made archives that explode hundreds of files into the current directory. All decompression is done in a temporary subdir, which is removed if there was only one file/dir at the top level.

For xkcd, see atool's --explain or --simulate options that show you the generated tar/etc commands.

http://www.nongnu.org/atool/

Atool already comes with appropriate aliases for all the common tasks:

    $ wajig list-files atool | grep bin/
    /usr/bin/atool
    /usr/bin/arepack
    /usr/bin/aunpack
    /usr/bin/apack
    /usr/bin/als
    /usr/bin/acat
    /usr/bin/adiff

Newer versions of tar do automatically use the correct procedure based on the extension, just type tar xvf.

Woah, I was stuck in the past! Thanx for the tips!

Just do "tar -xf" for all your file extracting needs. The other command-line parameters are pretty much only needed if you want to override the detected compression format.

It can.

    $ ls
    foo.tar.gz
    $ tar -xf foo.tar.gz
    $ ls
    foo.tar.gz
    my_file.md

It does, I always extract files with:

tar xf <file>

(as in eXtract File)

The xkcd answer could be: tar t

I always see people using tar -zxvf <file>, I'm guessing they tried that and it worked, and they never needed to look in the manpage. I feel that

lame@user:~/$ tar --help

Zip doesn't mean windows, lots of us Linux people don't like tar.

Lots of us Linux people don't like Zip, so?

To point out the obvious, Zip compresses files individually and then bundles them. A .tar.{Z,gz,bz2,xz,...} files bundles the files and then compresses them. The latter is better for entropy reduction, the former is better for random access. It all depends on your objectives.

Of course, but that's entirely beside the point; my comment was on the author assuming zip implied a windows user, it does not. Zip is ubiquitous on all OS's which is why github offers zip.

What always leaves a puzzled look on my face (as a Windows user) is .tar.gz. What does .tar do in the case where there's nothing but a single gzipped file being archived?

Preserves the permission, user, group, time-stamps, and complete original name and path. Granted, there's a small overlap with what gzip also provides, but a tar file is as close to the original as you generally gets. Oh, and exotic: support for sparse files (if enabled).