Compress and decompress

There are many compression formats and you need different tools to compress/decompress them.

extension

compres command

decompress command .Z

The last format is actually compressed tar file. New version of tar can compress/decompress tar file directly but if your tar does not have a -z option, you can use two separate commands:

gzip -d file.tar.gz 
tar -xf file.tar

or use pipe

gzip -cd file.tar.gz | tar xf -