If you don't want to remember that in the short option cluster the -f has to come last, you may as well use the traditional tar argument passing style.
tar cfv archive.tar folder
Also, I have to note that saying that "tar archive is essentially a zipfile" is a bit backwards. First, tar is 10 years older than zip. Second, ZIP is a format that supports compression with a number of algorithms. TAR archives are, essentially, bytestreams, with whatever compression algorithm you want put on top. GNU tar supports invocation of gzip, lzma, zstd, bzip2 and others, but nothing stops you from piping tar output to your custom compression algorithm. That's slightly different from GNU zip which, as far as I know, always compresses the information.
If you don't want to remember that in the short option cluster the
-f
has to come last, you may as well use the traditionaltar
argument passing style.Also, I have to note that saying that "tar archive is essentially a zipfile" is a bit backwards. First,
tar
is 10 years older than zip. Second, ZIP is a format that supports compression with a number of algorithms. TAR archives are, essentially, bytestreams, with whatever compression algorithm you want put on top. GNUtar
supports invocation of gzip, lzma, zstd, bzip2 and others, but nothing stops you from pipingtar
output to your custom compression algorithm. That's slightly different from GNUzip
which, as far as I know, always compresses the information.Thanks for your comment and adding this! :)