Under Unix there are some widely used applications to archive and
compress files. tar is used to make archives, that is collections of
files. To make a new archive:
$ tar -cvf <archive_name.tar> <file> [file...]
To extract files from an archive:
$ tar -xpvf <archive_name.tar> [file...]
To list the contents of an archive:
$ tar -tf <archive_name.tar> | less
Files can be compressed to save disk space using compress, which is
obsolete and shouldn't be used any more, or gzip:
$ compress <file>
$ gzip <file>
that creates a compressed file with extension .Z (compress) or .gz
(gzip). These programs don't make archives, but compress files
individually. To decompress, use:
$ compress -d <file.Z>
$ gzip -d <file.gz>
RMP.
The unarj, zip and unzip utilities are also available. Files
with extension .tar.gz or .tgz (archived with tar, then
compressed with gzip) are very common in the Unix world. Here's how to
list the contents of a .tar.gz archive:
$ gzip -dc <file.tar.gz> | tar tf - | less
To extract the files from a .tar.gz archive:
$ gzip -dc <file.tar.gz> | tar xvf -