Party pooper checking in: easier to remember is that v is the verbose option in most tools, x and f you already know, z is auto-detected for as long as I remember so you don't need to pass that. Add c for creating an archive and, congratulations, you can now do 90% of the tasks you'll ever want to do with tar, especially defusing xkcd bombs!
(To go for 99%, add t for testing an archive to your repertoire. This is all I ever use; anything else I do with the relevant tools that I already know, like compression settings `tar c . | zstd -19 > my.tar.zstd` or extracting to a folder `cd /to/here && tar x ~/Downloads/ar.tar`. I'm sure tar has options for all this but that's not the one thing it should do and do well.)
I hadn't heard of the German option but I love it, shame really that z is obsolete :(
I mean, you're not wrong. Learning what stuff means is good :) But there's also the part where making up a ridiculous story, pun or such enables it being a very strong mnemonic.
I know v is just the verbose option, though I didn't know z was autodetected.
Way back (~15y or so?) I was reading bash.org just for the jokes cause I was on IRC, I knew what a tar/tar.gz file is, but I had never needed to extract one from the command line (might've been on Windows back then). However, because I remembered the funny joke, the first time I was on a Linux system confronted with a tgz, I knew exactly what to type :)
Honestly to this day, I've never needed to create a tar archive, only to unpack them (when I need to archive+compress files it's usually to send to other people, and I pick zip cause everyone can deal with it). But `tar --help` and `man tar` are there in case I ever might.
(To go for 99%, add t for testing an archive to your repertoire. This is all I ever use; anything else I do with the relevant tools that I already know, like compression settings `tar c . | zstd -19 > my.tar.zstd` or extracting to a folder `cd /to/here && tar x ~/Downloads/ar.tar`. I'm sure tar has options for all this but that's not the one thing it should do and do well.)
I hadn't heard of the German option but I love it, shame really that z is obsolete :(