tar: Refusing to read archive contents from terminal (missing -f option?)

I tried to unzip using tar -xvgf filename and it shows error like : tar: Refusing to read archive contents from terminal (missing -f option?)

1 Answer

Why the g in xvgf?

Based on the documentation:

`-g snapshot-file'
During a `--create' operation, specifies that the archive that tar creates is a
new GNU-format incremental backup, using snapshot-file to determine which files
to backup. With other operations, informs tar that the archive is in incremental
format.

It's not needed. Instead, do:

tar -xvf <filename>