475
That is a lot of flags
(lemmy.nz)
tar xvf unzip -l unzip -d
That would work if it was find instead of tar.
of course I know it, it's tldr tar
Honestly I just create and extract. I don't use most of the options. But, I had a lead about ten years ago dare me to create and compress a .tar.gz directly without looking it up and I was most of the way through typing it by the time he finished talking. He looked at me like I was doing black magic.
Tar used to be more complicated, some of the flags are not necessary anymore but I still create .tbz2 with cvjf and extract with xvzf.
Same but with math: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
Read here (PDF): https://archive.org/download/TheFeelingOfPower/The%20Feeling%20of%20Power.pdf
It's pretty simple
tar
e[x]tract
[z]is
[f]ile
[v]erbosely
archive.tar.gz
--directory=archivedir
For creation it's pretty much the same but you need to specify [c]reate, e.g. tar czvf archive.tar.gz filestoarchive/ and for lis[t]ing it's - tar tf archive.tar.gz
zis?
tar
[t]he
[f]uck
am_i_looking_at.tar.gz
Tar -xf doodoobutt.tar
it that simple.
Tar (some versions at least?) is actually smart enough to detect which format to use based on file extension of the output, so you don't need to remember which flag corresponds to which compressor. Examples:
tar -caf archive.tar.xz [files]
tar -caf archive.tar.bz2 [files]
# extract
tar -xf archive.tar.xz
tar -xf archive.tar.bz2
So you really only need to remember that c means create, x means extract
Thanks for sharing this.
eXtract Ze Vucking File
tar is usually smart enough to figure that .tar.gz is a compressed archive, so tar xvf suffices.
Moreover, .tar.xz archives are much more common nowadays, and the flag to tell tar to use xz decompression is J. Yes, uppercase J I shit you not, because all other letters of alphabet were already taken. The next commandline option added to tar is going to be a Unicode emoji symbol.
i always forgot about -J so i got used to writing tar --xz -cvf archive.tar.xz file1 file2… instead. it's a bit more explicit and i'll never have to hunt for the same flag in the man page again.
tar 🤏🗨️👉 archive files
The flag to extract .bz2 files is 'j'. Not confusing at all.
Burrows–Wheeler algorithm or block-compression algorithm, the bzip2 file compression program was developed by Julian Seward.
Ah yes, totally makes sense.
XZ Utils started as a Unix port of Igor Pavlov's LZMA (Lempel–Ziv–Markov) algorithm, by Lasse Collin, and then by the Tukaani Project.
So apparently the uppercase J stands for "that guy who made a better compression algorithm than Julian".
Talk to me when you ffmpeg by heart 😭
i wish i could get ffmpegged
guy getting bred by two girls call that ffmpreg
I’m just glad that ffmpeg is smart enough when converting audio that all you need to do is pass the input and output.
I got it, mostly... The various filter chains, not so much. But I can map input streams and set dispositions and metadata, and know a bunch of svtav1 passthru params by heart; with enough experience to set pretty decent crf/preset/filmgrain-synth settings by eyeballing the input (ofc specifics depends on the video encoder and whether or not I'm using something like the psyex/hdr fork...)
Some people look at this as wizardry, but it's really not too hard once to get the hang of ordered arguments... Like whether or not you put -ss before or after -i changes the seeking behavior.... Okay, it's a little wizardry.
You say
not too hard
I say
ffmpeg is always funny to me, because it feels like you could convert anything into anything, if you just knew the right flags, but 99% of my use is extracting a clip out of a video file.
And the command for that is in my shell history, so I wouldn't know the flags either. ¯\_(⊙_ʖ⊙)_/¯
HAH! I know!!! The "correct" flags are always: Ctrl + r 'ffmpeg' an undefined amount of times 8D
Ffmpeg is tough but you should strive to openssl.
Let that be my next new year's resolution.
I mean, I at least know the simple stuff like transcode (with hw accel), scaling and trimming by heart, but filters? Hell no
Same here. Except I have only learned how to encode with x264 for now, without hw accel because learning the (in my case) nvenc switches and options is a whole other chapter...
Lemmy got an Ai hate boner but this is the first thing zi ever really used it for that wasn't research. "Give me the corrct ffmpeg command for _ and explain every flag concisely."
While I wouldn't use AI myself for ehtical, environmental and detrimental reasons, I also don't judge anybody that does. Just make sure to vet the information on your own too! 😊 What did you use ffmpeg for BTW?
It's very clutch in general when you need a smaller file size or different format.
Converting my blender videos to smaller sizes for tiktok/ig to avoid their compression. I eventually just started going for smaller 15second vids, don't usually have to compress and I'm not making money either way. Was pretty useful tho, I saved one command and would just swap the names of the files, used it on my iphone through A-shell quite a bit.
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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2026
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