As you probably know tar is designed to store and extract files from an archive file (a tarfile). Here I’ll show you some basic usage of this tool…

Here we go!

Archive a set of files:

tar -cvf tarfile.tar /var/log/syslog /var/log/messages

Archive and compress (gzip) a set of files:

tar -cvzf file.tar.gz /var/log/syslog /var/log/messages

Archive and compress (bzip2) a set of files:

tar -cvjf file.tar.bz2 /var/log/syslog /var/log/messages

Extract a tar file:

tar -xvf file.tar
tar -xvzf file.tar.gz
tar -xvjf file.tar.bz2

Display the content of a tar file:

tar -tvf file.tar
tar -tvzf file.tar.gz
tar -tvjf file.tar.bz2


source:
http://www.karkomaonline.com/index.php/2005/03/basic-tar-usage-gnu-tar/