Have you ever wondered why the unix command tar is a cryptic mess and everytime you need to use it you need to head back to the man page to look them up? Well fear no more – you could just remember these mnemonic flags instead and make your life easier!

$ file archive.tar.gz
archive.tar.gz: gzip compressed data, last modified: Sun Dec 24 13:42:15 2023, from Unix, original size modulo 2^32 1372672

list contents of an archive

Use wtf: what the fuck is in that archive?

$ tar wtf archive.tar.gz
- 8<-

extract the archive

Use pfx: please fucking extract the archive!

$ tar pfx archive.tar.gz
- 8<-