Fortunately GNU tar has gotten smarter. You can do just "tar xvf" now and it will do the right thing whether the archive is compressed or not. When creating th

Fortunately GNU tar has gotten smarter. You can do just "tar xvf" now and it will do the right thing whether the archive is compressed or not. When creating the archive, you still have to use your favorite compression method (XZ aka LZMA, activated with J is even better, but slightly slower, than bzip).