I hate it when I download a source archive, uncompress it, and find that instead of creating a package directory, with the contents of the archive, the archive was created with a bunch of files at the root directory. Suppose I have a downloads directory with lots of archives. After I uncompress this new archive, I now have a bunch of archive files and a bunch of project specific files all in the same directory. Yuck.
> cd downloads
> tar -xzf latestdownload.tar.gz
> # yuck, stupid package contents in my downloads directory.
Yeah, Yeah, I know I could have listed the package contents (tar -tzf ..) and found that I needed to create a directory first but I’m lazy. So the mess is there. Now to clean it up:
> tar -tzf latestdownload.tar.gz | xargs rm -rf
There. Files gone. You can do the same thing with unzip -t for zip archives.
Thank you! I often find myself in the same lazy situation as you described so this tip will be used many times.