orthoxerox parent
To quote bash.org (or qdb.us?), you have to talk to tar with a German accent:
where xzf stands for "extrakt ze feil"
It's `xaf`, because the modern world is way too complex for simple Germanic rules to solve it.
But GNU tar was never the issue. It's almost completely straight forward, the only problem it has is people confusing the tar file with the target directory. If you use some UNIX tar, you will understand why everybody hates it.