tar and compression

tar basics — create, extract, list

tar -cvf archive.tar dir/              # create .tar (no compression)
tar -czvf archive.tar.gz dir/          # create .tar.gz (gzip)
tar -cjvf archive.tar.bz2 dir/        # create .tar.bz2 (bzip2)
tar -cJvf archive.tar.xz dir/         # create .tar.xz (xz)
tar --zstd -cvf archive.tar.zst dir/  # create .tar.zst (zstd)

tar -xvf archive.tar               # extract (auto-detects compression)
tar -xzvf archive.tar.gz           # explicit gzip
tar -xjvf archive.tar.bz2          # explicit bzip2
tar -xJvf archive.tar.xz           # explicit xz