tar gz tgz and tar bz2 On linux distributions we commonly see files named tar, tgz, tar.gz and tar.bz2. This note tries to explain common operations on such files. ta r tar is used to create a Tape ARchive. ( tar is from the old unix era) The resulting file is known as a tarball. A tar ball concatenates files to a a sin get the files out of a tarball, you can extract a tarball using tar -xvf something.tar To create a tar archive , the following command can be used. tar -c /home/mydir > mydir.tar tgz and tar.gz If the tarball has also been gzipped (compressed), the file will be named tar.gz or tgz .You can use the following command to extract it. tar -xvfz something.tar.gz If you want to create a tgz as below. tar czvf myfolder.tar.gz myfolder/ tar.bz2 A tar.bz2 uses bzip2 compression on a tarball. Generally the size will be less that a tar.gz file .If you have a .tar.bz2 file , issue this command: ( You need bzip2 installed) tar -xvjf file-1.0.tar.bz2 If you want to creat...