Extracing tar files (without and with gzip or bzip) on Linux

When importing data you will probably be extracting or unpacking a tarball File
To unpack or extract a tar file, type:

tar -xvf file.tar

To save disk space and bandwidth files are saved using compression program such as gzip or bzip2. To extract / unpack a .tar.gz (gzip) file, enter (note -z option):

tar -xzvf file.tar.gz

To extract / unpack a .tar.bz2 (bzip2) file, enter (note -j option):

tar -xjvf file.tar.bz2

to extract gzip file

tar xvzf file.tar.gz