I hitched my horse to just what I consider the basics–zip and unzip–and that has made it easy for me. But I’ve been stuck on those.

Extract anything:

tar xf <archive_file>

Create a tbz2 archive:

tar cjf <archive_file.tbz2> <stuff to put in it>

(And tossing in a -v is pretty universal, if that’s your thing.)

Some day, instead of commenting on a reddit Lemmy post, I think I’ll Google how to tell it to use .xz.

Ok, you know what? Today is finally that day. It’s just capital -J instead of lower-case -j! That’s easy enough to remember, I guess.