Ethan

I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. This thread started because I said I’ve never understood why people talk like tar is some indecipherable black magic. Common tasks are easy and there’s a man page for everything else.

Literally the only time I’ve ever run into that is when I was trying to manipulate the path it extracted to. In 99% of cases I’m doing tf, xf, or cf plus flags for the compression type, etc, and those differences are irrelevant.

I almost never create a tarball, so I have to look up the syntax for that. Which is as simple as man tar. But as far as extracting it almost couldn’t be easier, tar xf <tarball> and call it a day. Or if you want to list the contents without extracting, tar tf <tarball>. Unless you’re using an ancient version of tar, it will detect and handle whatever compression format you’re using without you having to remember if you need z or J or whatever.

I’ve never understood why people are so intimidated by tar

If you’re adding code you don’t understand to a production system you should be fired

Edit: I assumed it was obvious from context that I’m referring to copy-pasting code from stack overflow or an LLM or whatever without knowing what it does but apparently that needs to be said explicitly.

I have to strongly disagree with you. I’ve used WSL 2 with VSCode, and I experienced waaaaaaaay more weird broken shit than I ever have running Linux. And even if it weren’t for that, it’s still not at all worth it IMO because using WSL 2 means every interaction I have with my development environment has to go through a Linux-to-Windows translation layer. I will never use Windows again for anything beyond testing unless I’m forced to.