So today I was trying to tarball a large file and wanted to use the lzma compression method. I’ve done it before but couldn’t remember the syntax and couldn’t get it right by guessing. So, off the the man-page for a quick refresher and I found this little gem:

-a, –auto-compress use archive suffix to determine the compression program

No need to specify the algorithm explicitly, just add the “a” to your options and pick the file-name suffix of the compression type you want to use. Sweet!

I just love finding the little things in Linux that make life easier and confirms for me all the reasons I like using it.