Do we need to specify compression level when extracting a compressed tar file? [closed]

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From my tests so far on OSX 10.8 and CentOS 5.5, it looks like tar automatically deduces the compression type of an archive, i.e., I could do tar -xf <compressed archive> instead of doing tar -jxf <bzip2 compressed archive> or tar -zxf <gzip compressed archive>.

I would like to know if I can depend on this automatic compression detection feature of tar, or is this feature new?

These are the tar versions I played with.

OSX 10.8 -- bsdtar 2.8.3 - libarchive 2.8.3

CentOs 5.5 -- tar (GNU tar) 1.15.1

Thanks,

Answer 1

It appears that modern gnu-tar is able to auto-detect all compression types, as mentioned here. So to answer your question, no you don't have to specify type, and yes tar -xf will always work fine.