Compress an Entire Directory or a Single File
Use the following command to compress an entire directory or a single file on Linux. It’ll also compress every other directory inside a directory you specify–in other words, it works recursively.
tar -czvf name-of-archive.tar.gz /path/to/directory-or-file
Extract an Archive
Once you have an archive, you can extract it with the tar command. The following command will extract the contents of archive.tar.gz to the current directory.
tar -xzvf archive.tar.gz
