If I'm moving a file or copying or using tar is the last forward slash essential - is there a difference in any context between

cp ~/file.txt /usr/share/themes

and

cp ~/file.txt /usr/share/themes/

and the mv and tar -xf equivalents?

Thanks.

Providing themes is a directory, there is no difference between those two cp commands.

tar is different, because you could be specifying a directory tree or a specific file. Not covering it all, but the general form for tar (to create an archive) is:And I believe if you specify with or without the final slash in the [pathname] argument, the result is the same. But if you use the form with no slash as your [tar-output-file] what it may do is create a tar file matching that directory name, at the same level where that directory resides. If you use the form with an ending slash and nothing following it, tar will likely complain that you haven't given it a valid [tar-output-file].

Going in the other direction, to de-archive an existing tar, the last argument would be the name of the tar file and that term is not applicable to your ending slash argument. However if you use the -C argument for tar, which is to "change to directory", also known as --directory, then it will place the files extracted from your archive into the specified directory. In that case you can use a trailing slash, or not; however in both cases, if that directory does not exist, you'll get a complaint.

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Two things to add to what I said here are:

1.) The best things to do when you have questions like this are to run some tests on your own machine.
2.) If I'm writing something into a script and I doubt one way versus another, or have witnessed shells which treat the more open command condition differently, I always be as explicit as possible and fully write out the entire path and filenames so that I don't get bitten.

Thanks for that. Yes, generally I would experiment. I did recently make a mess of using rm so I'm not feeling quite as intrepid at the moment...