Nowadays, `tar -xf foo.tar.gz` (at least in Linux) will auto-detect the gzipping and just do the right thing. I think it uses file extension, so I'd suspect it

Nowadays, `tar -xf foo.tar.gz` (at least in Linux) will auto-detect the gzipping and just do the right thing. I think it uses file extension, so I'd suspect it works for .bz2 and .xz too. (Not sure I'd use this for shell scripts, but for everyday command line it should work.)