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How did you choose the letter "j"? were all the more obvious ones just taken?

The original intention for most of the flags was to keep them aligned with rsync. The feature only compressed the data in flight, as opposed to -Z/z which stored the compressed version. This didn't directly align to anything in rsync, so I picked an unused letter in rsync (-J/j).

In retrospect, it might have had a better home as some option on -Z/z, or if I had the tool figure out if you were bottlenecked on bandwidth, spare compute, and your data compressed well, and apply it automatically.

I don't know how long this flag has been there, but -z does mean compression in-flight in rsync.

> -z, --compress compress file data during the transfer

You're totally right! If anything the gsutil's -Z/z doesn't align with rsync's -Z/z, and gsutil's -J/j is a better match for what rsync's -Z/z does. I added -J/j well after -Z/z was there so it's something that we have to life with unfortunately.

Maybe the inspiration was `-j` for `tar`, which enables bzip2 compression?

Now we just have to explain why -j means bzip2 for 'tar'...

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