One way to extract a .tar.Z file:
$ zcat file.tar.Z | tar xvf -
Tag Archives for tar
How to decompress .tar.bz2 file
Normally, I would bunzip the file first, then untar it next. But I found something after googling for a shortcut: it can all be done with just one tar command.
$tar -xjvf example.tar.bz2
Notice that, we use j flag to decompress bzip2 file and z flag for gzip file. 
