(=tape archiver) Untar a tarred and compressed tarball (*.tar.gz or *.tgz) that you downloaded from the Internet. 
 

tar -xvf filename.tar 

Untar a tarred but uncompressed tarball (*.tar). 
 

gunzip filename.gz 

Decompress a zipped file (*.gz" or *.z). Use gzip (also zip or compress) if you wanted to compress files to this file format. 
 

bunzip2 filename.bz2 

(=big unzip) Decompress a file (*.bz2) zipped with bzip2 compression utility. Used for big files. 
 

unzip filename.zip 

Decompress a file (*.zip) zipped with a compression utility compatible with PKZIP for DOS. 
 

unarj e filename.arj 

Extract the content of an *.arj archive. 
 

uudecode -o outputfile filename 

Decode a file encoded with uuencode.  uu-encoded files are typically used for transfer of non-text files in e-mail (uuencode transforms any file into an ASCII file). 

See Also
Get Two Strings Next To Known String

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