File (De)compression for newbies

I Wanna Be A Geek ― tar -zxvf filename.tar.gz (=tape archiver) Untar a tarred and compressed tarball (*.tar.gz or *.tgz) that you downloaded from the Internet. tar -xvf filename.tar Untar a tarred but uncompressed tarball (*.tar). gunzip filename.gz Decompress a zipped file (*.gz" or *.z). Use gzip (also zip or compress) if you wanted to compress files to this file format. bunzip2 filename.bz2 (=big unzip) Decompress a file (*.bz2) zipped with bzip2 compression utility. Used for big files. unzip filename.zip [...].