Sometimes it’s hard to remember all the options you need to include to tar and gzip files or a folder from the command line. Here it is…
tar -cvzf tarballname.tar.gz myfilestocompress
To untar and unzip simply do:
tar xvfz filename.tar.gz
And if there are only certain files you want in the tar then do:
tar xvzf filename.tar.gz */dir.you.want/*