How to untar a tar file or gzip-bz2 tar file

Tar file can come compressed or uncompressed. Generally that are compressed using gzip or bzip2. The program, tar, will uncompress both types and extract the files from archive.

Steps

 * 1) Type at the command prompt
 * tar xzf file.tar.gz- to uncompress a gzip tar file (.tgz or .tar.gz)
 * tar xjf file.tar.bz2 - to uncompress a bzip2 tar file (.tbz or .tar.bz2) to extract the contents.
 * tar xf file.tar - to uncompressed tar file (.tar)
 * tar xC /var/tmp -f file.tar - to uncompress tar file (.tar) to another directory
 * 1) * x = eXtract, this indicated an extraction c = create to create )
 * 2) * v = verbose (optional) the files with relative locations will be displayed.
 * 3) * z = gzip-ped; j = bzip2-zipped
 * 4) * f = from/to file ... (what is next after the f is the archive file)
 * 5) * C = directory. In c and r mode, this changes the directory before adding the following files. In x mode, changes directoriy after opening the archive but before extracting entries from the archive.
 * 6) The files will be extracted in the current folder (most of the times in a folder with the name 'file-1.0').