How tar xvfz works in cygwin?

I tried tar with xvfz and -xvfc both didn’t work in Cygwin on Windows.

$ tar xvfz sshpass-1.0.5.tar.gz
tar (child): sshpass-1.0.5.tar.gz: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

Here cmd tar with ‘-‘

$ tar -xvfz sshpass-1.0.5.tar.gz
tar: z: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

Question : 1 . How does tar works with - or without _ ?

Please suggest to execute tar -xvfz sshpass-1.0.5.tar.gz.

Answer

tar has 3 types of syntax (according to this ):

long options (–file) short options (-f) old options (f) For the old option syntax, all the letters must follow “tar” and must all fall into a single clump with no spaces. The order of the letters doesn’t really matter, so long as the arguments to those letters follow the same order after the clump of options.

This old way of writing tar options can surprise even experienced users. For example, the two commands:

 # tar cfz sshpass-1.0.5.tar.gz file
 # tar -cfz sshpass-1.0.5.tar.gz file

are quite different. The first example uses ‘sshpass-1.0.5.tar.gz’ as the value for option ‘f’ and recognizes the option ‘z’. The second example, however, uses ‘z’ as the value for option ‘f’ — probably not what was intended.

Old options are kept for compatibility with old versions of tar.

The command with a ‘-‘ is equivalent to

tar -czf sshpass-1.0.5.tar.gz file
tar -cf sshpass-1.0.5.tar.gz -z file
tar cf sshpass-1.0.5.tar.gz -z file