[HomeGear]

>“Well why does the entire internet say to use dd then?” Because they copy from each other just like you copied from them.

Great statement. This brings me some much needed internal clarity on my own thoughts and actions.

[chubot]

This is basically the parable of "Grandma's Ham"

https://www.executiveforum.com/cutting-off-the-ends-of-the-h...

tl;dr nobody in 2 generations knows why they cut the ends off the ham before cooking it, until they talked to grandma, who said her pan was too small

A Unix thing that's been posted to HN for a decade, that's almost literally the same story:

Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3519952

tl;dr /usr/bin is separate from /bin because someone had a small hard disk once

[ahartmetz]

So Grandma's Ham is a variant of Chesterton's Fence... When you do or don't do something for reasons of tradition, find the real reasons for doing / not doing it.

[soneil]

You’d be amazed how many people I’ve found that do ‘tar xzf filename’ without knowing what xzf is doing.

[sam_bristow]

I'll admit to being one of those people. My brain still spells it out as eXtract Ze Files every time :-P

[jthrowsitaway]

Passing "z" is pretty pointless for extractions.

[avgcorrection]

I don't tend to amaze myself.