It's nice to check if you're about to extract a 1MB tarball into 2TBs of data before actually running out of disk space.
Most tar programs do prevent extracting tarballs containing absolute paths (like '/etc/passwd') and relative paths (like '../../../etc/passwd'), but older tar programs still allow that. And programs written in Go, because of course: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/55356
Overall, if your HDD size is infinite and you're using GNU tar, or another recent tar, you can skip 't' I think before doing a '-C' extraction into some safe directory.
Most tar programs do prevent extracting tarballs containing absolute paths (like '/etc/passwd') and relative paths (like '../../../etc/passwd'), but older tar programs still allow that. And programs written in Go, because of course: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/55356
Overall, if your HDD size is infinite and you're using GNU tar, or another recent tar, you can skip 't' I think before doing a '-C' extraction into some safe directory.