caesar wrote:tar -cf archive.tar directory/file
gzip archive.tar
I prefer:
tar cfz archive.tgz directory/file(s)
also a good choice is:
tar cfj archive.tar.bz2 directory/file(s)
for zip there is an "unzip" and for rar i believe there is an "unrar" which however needs to be installed first... I am pretty sure some of the GUI based archieving tools support these (often just an interface to the CLI tools in the end...)