Why do people have such a difficult time with tar? The only tar commands I've ever needed (or seen other people need) are `tar cf ...` or `tar xf ...` (occasionally I'll need to chuck a z in there if the file is/needs to be gzipped), are other people just using far more complex tar commands than I am?
I agree and wish distro maintainers could make some changes. I would love to use manual pages, but instead I search the Internet first. If every manual had a section with most-common examples, it would help immensely. You could just type 'manexamples tar' and it would print out
tar cvf somedir filename.tar
create an archive from somedir and store it in filename.tar
tar xvpf filename.tar
extract the contents of filename.tar and scatter them around your home directory
Instead of getting examples that I might use, when I visit a man page, I get a wall of text 926 lines long, describing every possible option, including GNU option styles, or some truncated mess telling me to read the info pages.
Of course, it's appropriate that all this information is included somewhere in the manual. I just think the common use cases should be first. Does anyone need a man page for 'ls' that starts off describing how to list inode numbers and SELinux labels?
It's sort of embarrassing how much less efficient man pages are than a Google search to a SO question.
The justification I usually hear is that SO is for learning to solve one case, while man pages are for learning how the tool works. There's some merit to that, but if a tool has some hidden gotcha or unusual use, SO tends to make that much clearer than the actual documentation.
I suppose comprehensiveness was a higher priority when there wasn't an online discussion of every imaginable case, but it still feels like a lot could be done to convey the same amount of information more gracefully.
I'd love to get a man page like that but all too often they don't list examples near the top like that. If I open the tar man page for cygwin (probably an older one) I get a bunch of stuff about unix style and gnu style usage, then some irrelevant notes (where the full manual is), then a long winded description about how "tar -xvf" is the same as "tar -x -v -f", then the full descriptions of each option.
It sounds like this project moved in the right direction and made the man page more efficient than googling, but many others haven't.
IMHO, the minimum expected from a man page is to be complete. For example, this link does not give enough information to understand why "tar cfz x.tgz x" works, but not "tar -tfz x.tgz"
It says in the man page explicitly that it's not complete and you should look at `info tar` for the full man page. Also, because the problem really has nothing to do with tar -- every man page doesn't need to explain how old/short/long options work.
Section 3.3.3 "Old Option Styles" covers exactly the situation you describe.
> This old way of writing 'tar' options can surprise even experienced users. For example, the two commands:
> tar cfz archive.tar.gz file
> tar -cfz archive.tar.gz file
> are quite different. The first example uses 'archive.tar.gz' as the value for option 'f' and recognizes the option 'z'. The second example, however, uses 'z' as the value for option 'f' -- probably not what was intended.
> Old options are kept for compatibility with old versions of 'tar'.
> This second example could be corrected in many ways, among which the following are equivalent:
> I've just never understood why tar can't have sane defaults like zip.
Because tar means "tape archiver", and back when it was created, most of the time, you only needed one option: c, t or x (create, test, extract). You didn't need to pass f (file) because you actually piped tar to something that would append to a tape device (or read from it). And back then, compression (z, j, J, a) wasn't common place for tapes.
Why do people have such a difficult time with tar? The only tar commands I've ever needed (or seen other people need) are `tar cf ...` or `tar xf ...` (occasionally I'll need to chuck a z in there if the file is/needs to be gzipped), are other people just using far more complex tar commands than I am?