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What were the magic letters you need to add again, to just fucking unpack something? (feddit.org)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/linuxsucks

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The problem is, tar isn't a packing program, it's a tape archive program that's been repurposed for general files-to-file archival with optional compression plugins

At this point, if it were written today, it probably would behave as you suggest, but changing it now would break too many things that use it

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

Then it would've been time to deprecate it for this purpose, and use something sensible instead, say about 13 years ago.
All the old stuff can then keep using tar, but the nicer option can become the standard for user-friendly file extraction.