A very minimal guide to the tar command

to extract from an archive

• for .tar use tar -xvf [archiveName] 
• for .tar.gz, .tgz  use tar -xvzf [archivefile]
• for .tar.bz2, .tbz2, .tbz  use tar -xvjf [archivefile]
• for .tar.Z than use tar -xvZf [archivefile}

to compress a folder or a list of files

• for .tar use tar -cvf [archiveName] [pathname ...]
• for .tar.gz, .tgz  use tar -cvzf [archiveName] [pathname ...]
• for .tar.bz2, .tbz2, .tbz  use tar -cvjf [archivename] [pathname ...]
• for .tar.Z use tar -cvZf [archivename] [pathname ...]

[pathname ...] can be the path of a folder or the path of a list of files you want to compress.

to see the content of an archive, without extracting:

• for .tar use tar -tvf [archiveName] 
• for .tar.gz, .tgz  use tar -tvzf [archivefile]
• for .tar.bz2, .tbz2, .tbz  use tar -tvjf [archivefile]
• for .tar.Z use tar -tvZf [archivefile}