Sometimes you would need to extract or create an archive file, i.e to install a script, you would usually download an archive and extract it to continue the installation. The very first step in the process would be to identify the exact archive type by looking at the file extension. The most common archive types are zip (ending with .zip), tar (.tar), Tar+Gunzip (.tar.gz), Bzip (.bz2) and Rar (.rar).

Each archive type has its own command for compressing/extracting as listed below.

To extract a ZIP file, you can use:

unzip archive.zip

To extract a Tar file, you can use:

tar -xvf archive.tar

To extract a Tar.Gz file, you can use:

tar -zxvf archive.tar.gz

To extract a Rar file, you can use:

rar x archive.rar

Each archive type has its own mechanism to create a new archive file. The most commonly used however is the tar.gz format. An example of creating such a file is:

tar -zcf archive-name.tar.gz foldername/

The above will archive the entire folder foldername in an archive named archive-name.tar.gz in the current working directory.