[Techtalk] tar xfvj

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 08:40:59AM -0800 or thereabouts, Carla Schroder wrote:
> On Tuesday 02 March 2004 1:47 am, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> 
> 
> Thanks Telsa and everyone. I finally found the -j option in 
> 'info tar'. It's not mentioned in 'short option summary.' It's 
> in the 'Option Summary' node- under b, for --bzip2. (insert 
> ritual 'info suxors' rant.) 

Oh. Much simpler way, for any GNU-supplied program: 

  'tar --help' and 'tar --help | less' (it's long)

$ tar --help |grep "\j"
  -j, --bzip2                        filter the archive through bzip2


The '--help' is _so_ useful; but you can only guarantee it is
there on GNU programs. Some others use -help (I believe cdrecord
may, and xterm does). And some others will think you just 
provided an argument called '--help': 'talk --help' does exactly 
this :) Typically these are the original BSD programs. nslookup
doesn't like --help either.

I am sure I remember a story from a friend using the command
'host' or 'hostname' on .. hmm, Solaris or even SunOS perhaps:
it was certainly a long time ago...whilst root, unthinkingly 
adding an argument, and discovering he had just renamed the box :)
I don't think this happens on Linux these days, but I liked
the story. Almost as good as the friend on SunOS who accidentally
mounted a filesystem on top of the directory containing the
umount command :) 

Telsa