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What were the magic letters you need to add again, to just fucking unpack something? (feddit.org)

submitted 1 month ago by superkret@feddit.org to c/linuxsucks@lemmy.world

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Bonus question: With or without - ?

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[–] laurelraven@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The problem is, tar isn't a packing program, it's a tape archive program that's been repurposed for general files-to-file archival with optional compression plugins

At this point, if it were written today, it probably would behave as you suggest, but changing it now would break too many things that use it

[–] superkret@feddit.org 6 points 1 month ago

Then it would've been time to deprecate it for this purpose, and use something sensible instead, say about 13 years ago.
All the old stuff can then keep using tar, but the nicer option can become the standard for user-friendly file extraction.