There are five main archival utilities available on most Linux systems:

• tar
• gzip
• xz
• bzip2
• zip

tar creates uncompressed archives; it was originally intended for use creating tape backups, but now finds usage anywhere you’d like to turn a bunch of files into one file. Files are stored linearly in the tarball, so it’s very cheap (computationally) to work with tar archives.

tar archives are often combined with a compression utility, which is where the tar.xz, tar.gz, tar.bz2 files come from. On *nix platforms we tend to have separate archival utilities (like tar, used for turning a set of files or directory into a single file) and compression utilities (e.g., gzip, bzip2, xz, used to reduce the amount of disk space a file uses), in contrast to the Windows approach of a single tool for both (e.g., zip, rar, 7z).

The four “zip” utilities use different algorithms, offering different ratios of speed to compression:

• gzip is the fastest, and uses the least memory, but offers the (relative) lowest compression ratio.
• xz at moderate compression levels is faster than bzip2 and offers better compression. Modern hardware is so fast that you should probably default to this.
• bzip2 is an older compression format that offers good compression at the cost of slow computation. No real reason to use it over xz.
• zip is the format traditionally used on Windows.. it offers decent compression, and is a compression utility as well as an archival utility. This means that you can “zip” a directory. In addition, if you do zip a directory, each file is separately compressed (so you can extract just one file out of a directory) - though this means compression of redundant data in multiple files in the archive suffers.

To create a tar archive:

tar cf dest.tar source1 source2 source3

To gzip a file:

gzip file.txt

This will replace the source with a compressed file.txt.gz. To keep the file, pass the -k (--keep) argument.

To decompress a file, run gzip -d or gunzip the compressed file.

To bzip a file:

bzip2 file.txt

This will replace the source with a compressed file.txt.bz2. To keep the file, pass the -k (--keep) argument.

To decompress a file, pass the -d argument or bunzip2 the file.

To xz a file:

xz file.txt

Same deal with --keep, --decompress, and unxz.

To zip a file or directory:

zip files.zip file1.txt file2.txt

To unzip, simply specify unzip.

To assemble a directory or set of files into a tarball and compress it with gzip, with one command:

tar -czvf files.tar.gz file1.txt file2.txt

The arguments are:

• -c (create archive)
• -z (gzip)
• -v (verbose)
• -f (outfile)

If you wanted to xz the tarball instead, use the -J parameter in place of -z.

To extract (and decompress) a tarball:

tar -xvf files.tar.gz

To extract to a specific directory, specify the -C parameter and a target directory:

tar -xvf files.tar.gz -C /tmp/example

To list the contents of a tar archive, use the -t (--list) parameter:

$ tar -tvf files.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- wporter/wporter   0 2026-04-21 21:01 file1.txt
-rw-r--r-- wporter/wporter   0 2026-04-21 21:01 file2.txt

With GNU tar, compression will be automatically handled - you don’t need to specify compression type.

If needed (not GNU tar, or automatic detection doesn’t work), specify the “compression” parameter (-z, -J, etc) in addition to the other arguments.