Extract .tar.gz file:

1$ tar xvzf ./file.tar.gz

Extract only one subdirectory and all its sub-content:

1$ tar -xvzf my-archive.tar.gz --wildcards "./directory/subdirectory*"

Create a .tar.gz file:

1$ tar cvzf file.tar.gz ./subfolder

Extract all .gz files in the current folder:

1$ gunzip ./*.gz

Convert .tar.gz file to .tar.bz2 file:

1$ gzip -dc archive.tar.gz | bzip2 > archive.tar.bz2

Extract .tar.bz2 file:

1$ tar xvjf ./file.tar.bz2

Check a .bz2 file integrity:

1$ bzip2 --test ./file.bz2

Extract ./path/in/archive* subfolder content from all .tar.bz2 archives available in the current folder. Place the extracted content of each archive in a folder prefixed with the content- string:

1$ for ARCHIVE in `ls *.tar.bz2`; do DEST_FOLDER=content-`echo $ARCHIVE | cut -d '.' -f 1`; mkdir $DEST_FOLDER; tar -C $DEST_FOLDER -xvjf $ARCHIVE --wildcards "./path/in/archive*"; done

Create a .zip archive of current directory, including all sub-dirs:

1$ zip -r archive.zip ./*

One liner to download an archive and extract its content to a target folder:

1$ wget -O - "https://example.net/archive.zip" | tar -xz --directory /target-folder -f -

Create a 7-Zip archive (thanks to p7zip ) of a folder, including all sub-directories:

1$ 7za a archive.7z ./folder

Do the same as above, but split the archive in 50 Mib volumes:

1$ 7za a -v50m archive.7z ./folder

Extract content from self-extracting shell archives  :

1$ unshar archive.sh