[scjr]

I'm yet to see any of these command line tips show (GNU) tar with the -a (--auto-compress) tag

    # compress a file, tar will automatically compress it according to the file extension you use
    tar -caf archive.tar.gz file1 file2 ...
    
    # extract a file, again tar will automatically pass it through the right decompression program
    tar -xaf archive.tar.gz