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.
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 (
-).