How to compress with the linux 'tar' command

To compress a directory, I use:

tar -czvf foo.tar.gz foo

where foo is the name of the directory. (the options used: compress, gzip, verbose, file=foo)

To decompress the file, I use:

tar -xzvf foo.tar.gz

which creates a directory called foo with the files I compressed. (with option: extract)

For more information, see this useful page.