 for tape archive. It was originally designed as a program that would let people back up their files to magnetic tape. Here's the idea of an archive. Let's say you have some shirts and you want to store them away. You get a bag and put the shirts in the bag. Here's the command to tar the shirts tar dash CVF shirts tar orange green blue purple. Let's examine the options to the tar command. The C means that you are creating an archive. The V means verbose. If you use this option tar will give you output about what it's doing. The F means I want a file as output and it's followed by the file name in this case shirts tar. And finally the files that you want to go into the archive orange green blue purple. That makes the entire command tar dash CVF shirts tar orange green blue purple. When you need to get the shirts out of the bag just use the X option which stands for extract. Again V stands for verbose and F specifies the tar file shirts tar. That extracts all the files from the bag. If you had specified any file names after the tar file name only those files would have been extracted. Tar is very handy for backing up your files but there's one problem. The size of the tar file is greater than the size of the old all the original files. That's because there's some overhead involved in keeping track of the file positions in the archive as well as their names and other such things. The solution is to find some way to shrink the tar file so it takes up less space. So let's talk about how you compress files on Linux. Consider a file named car.txt. If you say GZIP car.txt the GZIP program compresses the file and renames the result as car.txt.gz. You don't have to add the extra .gz at the end. GZIP does that for you. GZIP isn't the only game in town. There's also a program named BZIP2. It adds the .BZ2 extension. So if I said BZIP2 car.txt I would get car.txt.BZ2 as my output file. BZIP2 works better on large files. The compressed files become smaller than with GZIP, but it takes more time to do the job. To uncompress a file use GUNZIP or BUNZIP2. The program will automatically remove the .gz or .BZ2 extension on the uncompressed file. So your commands would be GUNZIP car.txt.gz or BUNZIP2 car.txt.BZ2. Now let's see how this helps us with tar files. Remember how you created shirts.tar with the tar command tar-cvf shirts.tar orange green blue purple. You can now use GZIP on the shirts.tar file by typing GZIP shirts.tar and you'll get a smaller archive file named shirts.tar.gz. Because making a tar file and compressing it is such a common operation, compression has been built into tar. If you add the Z option to the tar command so your options now read dash cvzf, tar will use the GZIP method to compress the resulting tar file. Unlike the independent GZIP command you have to specify the .gz in your file name. It doesn't get added automatically. So in this case after the F you would put the file name shirts.tar.gz. Because a tar plus GZIP operation is so common you will often see people abbreviate the resulting file name extension as .tgz instead of .tar.gz. If you add the J option to the tar command so your options now read dash cvjf, tar will use the BZIP2 method to compress the resulting tar file. Again you must specify the .bz2 in your file name it's not automatic. So your command would now read tar dash cvjf shirts.tar.bz2 orange green blue purple. To extract the files in a tar GZIP file you use the X option for extract just as you did before and you add the Z option to stand for the G unzip compression method. So your command would be tar dash xvzf shirts.tar.gz. To extract the files in a tar BZIP2 file you use the X option to extract and you use the J option instead of Z to use the B unzip 2 uncompression method and your command would read tar dash xvjf shirts.tar.bz2