This is a very useful way to remember it, but nowadays it's better to drop the z (which immediately makes the mnemonic more forgettable, of course). tar can autodetect compression now, so tar -xf should work on anything from plain tar archives over tar.gz to more unusual compression algorithms like tar.xz or tar.bz2.
tar -xzfextract ze fileAnd
tar -czfcompress ze file. I saw someone post these mnemonic devices a while back and now I actually remember tar commands. Amazing!This is a very useful way to remember it, but nowadays it's better to drop the z (which immediately makes the mnemonic more forgettable, of course). tar can autodetect compression now, so
tar -xfshould work on anything from plain tar archives over tar.gz to more unusual compression algorithms like tar.xz or tar.bz2.(the z is specifically for gzip)
You don't even need the dash (
-).