tar -xzvf
-xis JUST A FUCKING SUBCOMMAND. And yes, it stands for "extract" just like you'd expect.-fmeans "read from a file and not stdin".-vstands for "verbose" like every other GNU program ever.-zmeans "use GZip to compress/decompress first", which is not only an easy mnemonic but is also (as other commenters pointed out) totally unnecessary in basic uses. Same for-Z,-j, and-J(different compresison algorithms). You can be excused if you need to look into the manual to remember which one is BZip and which one is XZ.