never seen that in my life until now - what does it do? Just unzip the file to dev/null? What's the purpose? Does the verbose flag show you what's inside but the dev/null means it's not written to disk while unzipping?
Actually, the files are decompressed to the current directory, it's the just output of the verbose flag that goes to /dev/null. Which makes is even more senseless.
Exactly. I've seen people who always do `tar xzvf` and have no idea removing the `v` is the correct way to make it not print the name of every file in the archive.
You didn't use to be able to suppress the 'z' switch. You had to specify 'z' or 'j' depending on whether you wanted gzip or bzip2 decompression. It's a somewhat recent (sometime in the last 15 years, I think) change to "tar" to make it just detect the compression algorithm.
Isn't it better though to omit the -v switch and do `ls *` and/or `tree` afterwards? That gives you the same information but structured so it's much easier to understand.
The advantage of -v is that you can see what is being extracted as it happens. This is useful if you have a tarball with thousands of small files, as otherwise it's hard to tell whether tar has got stuck or there are just a lot of files.
