If you want to do more than just “pack this directory up just as it is” you’ll pretty quickly get to the limits of zip. tar is way more flexible about selecting partial contents and transformation on packing or extraction.
tar cf foo.tar.xz wherever/
zip -r foo.zip wherever/
7z a foo.7z wherever/
I get that tar needs an f for no-longer-relevant reasons whereas other tools don’t, but I never understood the meme about it beyond that.
Is c for “create” really that much worse than a for “add”?
I think that’s pretty mean towards the free software developers spending their spare time on Latex and the GNU utils.
I and many academics use Latex, and I personally am very happy to be able to use something which is plain text and FLOSS.
I also don’t see your problems with tar; it does one thing and it does it good enough.
Yes, and I’d rather not have my time wasted by waiting on thousands of small files transfer, rather than just compressing it and the time spent of one file transferring being much smaller.
taris just the worst shell command in existence. Why do people still bother with it?What do you use instead?
atool is a good alternative apparently, but I am still new to it
I avoid it and use zip or 7z if I can. But for some crazy reason some people stil insist on using that garbage tool and I have no idea why.
If you want to do more than just “pack this directory up just as it is” you’ll pretty quickly get to the limits of zip. tar is way more flexible about selecting partial contents and transformation on packing or extraction.
Are zip and 7z really that much easier?
I get that
tarneeds anffor no-longer-relevant reasons whereas other tools don’t, but I never understood the meme about it beyond that. Iscfor “create” really that much worse thanafor “add”?Because everyone else does, and if everyone else does, then I must, and if I do, then everyone else must, and then everyone else does.
Repeat loop.
For all I care it goes on the same garbage dump as LaTeX.
speaking of which, you might want to check out typst if you haven’t heard of it - I really hope this replaces most uses of LaTeX in the next years.
I think that’s pretty mean towards the free software developers spending their spare time on Latex and the GNU utils.
I and many academics use Latex, and I personally am very happy to be able to use something which is plain text and FLOSS.
I also don’t see your problems with tar; it does one thing and it does it good enough.
You do you. Compression is waste of time; storage is cheap in that you can get more, but time? Time, you never get back.
as in time wasted transferring a highly compressible file that you didn’t bother compressing first?
it’s only a waste of time when the file format is already compressed.
Yes, and I’d rather not have my time wasted by waiting on thousands of small files transfer, rather than just compressing it and the time spent of one file transferring being much smaller.
I use zip/unzip if I have the option
Because it is faster to transport one big ass tar than 10k individual files, and compression is waste of time.