Tar tool brief manual.

Tar
tar is a tool for file compression on Linux, you can compress files into other format , like gzip (.tar.gz), bzip2 (.tar.bz2) and so on.

Compress Format
tar [cvfz] [tar ball file] [the files or directory are compressed in]

c          Create a tar ball
f          Specify tar ball file name
v          Show the processing verbose.
z          Compress to gzip format.

Example
tar zcvf etc.tar.gz /etc/*

Decompress Format
tar [-xvfz] [tar ball file] [target directory for decompressing out]

x             Decompress tar ball
f             Specify tar ball file name
v             Show the processing verbose.
z             Decompress for gzip format.(.gz)

Example
tar zxvf etc.tar.gz /home/