> I've just never understood why tar can't have sane defaults like zip.
Because tar means "tape archiver", and back when it was created, most of the time, you only needed one option: c, t or x (create, test, extract). You didn't need to pass f (file) because you actually piped tar to something that would append to a tape device (or read from it). And back then, compression (z, j, J, a) wasn't common place for tapes.
Because tar means "tape archiver", and back when it was created, most of the time, you only needed one option: c, t or x (create, test, extract). You didn't need to pass f (file) because you actually piped tar to something that would append to a tape device (or read from it). And back then, compression (z, j, J, a) wasn't common place for tapes.