@bx ahah, it's nothing wild

x - extract
v - verbose
j - bzip2
p - preserve permissions
f - (the thing after this needs to be the filename)

i've replaced j with a for the most part since that means "automatically detect the compression", but on older things, z for gzip is also handy

when i want to create something, i just replace x with c and i'm done

the only thing i don't used that baseline for is tar tv which lets you see the contents of a tar file (after f still)

@thingywott thats much more logical than i was expexting, asside from j being for bzip2, im guessing b was taken

@bx ahah, yeah! it looks like that's used to set the record size to a certain number of blocks?

@bx in the version of gentoo i had, the stage 3 tarball (the one that contains the precompiled base system) was packed in a .tar.bz2 file, and you extract it to the root of your filesystem with that command

the most important one was the "p"reserve permissions flag since you don't want to extract that archive all as your current user with default permissions

it looks like the options have changed since i did this though!

@thingywott that makes allot of sense! tar is definatly one of those formats ive not really had to use manually very often, though reading about gur history of it is very interrsting, didnt realise gur t was for tape

@bx oh yeah! tar files are basically just a bunch of files catted together with a separator between them, after all~ if you're curious, try tarring a bunch of text files together without compression and look at what the resulting tar looks like! ^^

they also have the concept of unix permissions, uids, and gids, which is why they are still very often used on linuxes for stuff

you would probably have a pretty hard time restoring a filesystem backup from a zip file

@thingywott im gonna have to try that sometime, it seems like gur format might be easy to implement reading / writing for if youre not using compression