for the last 14 years of my career, I was using stupidly overpowered Oracle exadata systems exclusively, so “slow” meant 3 seconds instead of 1.

Now that I’m retired, I pretty much never need to compress anything.

They really, really aren’t. Let’s take a look at this command together:

curl -L [some url goes here] | tar -xz

Sorry the formatting’s a bit messy, Lemmy’s not having a good day today

This command will start to extract the tar file while it is being downloaded, saving both time (since you don’t have to wait for the entire file to finish downloading before you start the extraction) and disk space (since you don’t have to store the .tar file on disk, even temporarily).

Let’s break down what these scary-looking command line flags do. They aren’t so scary once you get used to them, though. We’re not scared of the command line. What are we, Windows users?

• curl -L – tells curl to follow 3XX redirects (which it does not do by default – if the URL you paste into cURL is a URL that redirects (GitHub release links famously do), and you don’t specify -L, it’ll spit out the HTML of the redirect page, which browsers never normally show)
• tar -x – eXtract the tar file (other tar “command” flags, of which you must specify exactly one, include -c for Creating a tar file, and -t for Testing a tar file (i.e. listing all of the filenames in it and making sure their checksums are okay))
• tar -z – tells tar that its input is gzip compressed (the default is not compressed at all, which with tar is an option) – you can also use -j for bzip2 and -J for xz
• tar -f which you may be familiar with but which we don’t use here – -f tells tar which file you want it to read from (or write to, if you’re creating a file). tar -xf somefile.tar will extract from somefile.tar. If you don’t specify -f at all, as we do here, tar will default to reading the file from stdin (or writing a tar file to stdout if you told it to create). tar -xf somefile.tar (or tar -xzf somefile.tar.gz if your file is gzipped) is exactly equivalent to cat somefile.tar.gz | tar -xz (or tar -xz < somefile.tar – why use cat to do something your shell has built-in?)
• tar -v which you may be familiar with but which we don’t use here – tells tar to print each filename as it extracts the file. If you want to do this, you can, but I’d recommend telling curl to shut up so it doesn’t mess up the terminal trying to show download progress also: curl -L --silent [your URL] | tar -xvz (or -xzv, tar doesn’t care about the order)

You may have noticed also that in the first command I showed, I didn’t put a - in front of the arguments to tar. This is because the tar command is so old that it takes its arguments BSD style, and will interpret its first argument as a set of flags regardless of whether there’s a dash in front of them or not. tar -xz and tar xz are exactly equivalent. tar does not care.

It’s just a different layer of compression. Better than gzip generally, but the tradeoffs are exactly the same.

Present, I’m the tar cvJf insane

yes, and you still need zhe mnemonics

First bundling everything in a tar file just to compress the thing in an individual step is kinda stupid, though. Everything takes much longer because of that. If you don’t need to preserve POSIX permissions, tar is pointless anyway.

You don’t need the v, it just means verbose and lists the extracted files.

Me trying to decompress a .tar file

boom

Ixtrekt ze feils

German here and no shit - that is how I remember that since the first time someone made that comment

That’s so good I wish I needed to memorize the command

scp

I use zsh and love the fish autocomplete so I use this:

https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions

Also have fzf for ctrl + r to fuzzy find previous commands.

I believe it comes with oh-my-zsh, just has to be enabled in plugins and itjustworks™