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Comment by thrwaway69 | Hacker News Reader

I will bite - I have been using linux for 4 years. I have used tar a lot and I don't know what v means. I switch between -xvf, -xvz, etc.

x - extract | f - file | z - operating on tar.gz or similar.

Edit: v - verbose

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On OpenBSD (and other systems using mandoc as the default “man” program), I can jump to an unknown flag right away with the pager’s tag support: “:tv”

    -v      Verbose operation mode.  If -v is specified multiple times or if
            the -t option is also specified, tar will use a long format for
            listing files, similar to ls(1) -l.

Or I can tack #v onto the end of the web URL: https://man.openbsd.org/tar.1#v

man tar | awk -F , '/-v,/ {print $2}'

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