*niX: Howto Open/Create .tar / .tar.bz2 / tar.gz

To extract files from .tar file use the following syntax
tar xf filename.tar

To compress all file in one .tar file, use the following syntax
tar cvf filename .tar *

To view contents of .tar file:
tar tvf backup.tar 


To Open / Extract For tar.bz2,
tar jxvf filename.tar.bz2

For tar.gz,
tar zxvf filename.tar.gz