I’ve always failed at remembering how to create and extract tar archives. But hey, why not create a mnemonic!?
Creating a tar.gz file:
Create Zip File
tar <em>czf</em> newarchive.tar.gz /path/to/file
Extracting
eXtract Zip File
tar <em>xzf</em> somearchive.tar.gz
You can of course add the v option to turn on the verbose mode. eg:
tar xzfv <em>somearchive.tar.gz</em>
Or add a -C option to explicitly mention where you’d like the archive to extract to, like this:
tar xzf <em>somearchive.tar.gz</em> -C ~/ws