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Comment by ludwigvan | Hacker News Reader

Actually, for extracting tar files, using xf is enough.

    tar xf archive.tar.gz
    tar xf archive.tar.bz2

Still, this will be useful for other formats, I think. Thanks.

Don't you need the z and j flags, respectively? The way you write it works for uncompressed tars.

Did you check? GNU tar will guess based on file suffix.

That's cool, although most of the time when I use tar, it's in a command line like

    curl http://example.com/foo.tar.gz | tar zxf -