gzip' program, which is free of known
software patents and also compresses better than
`compress'. Files compressed with this method end with
`.gz'.
Gzip can also uncompress files compressed with `compress'
(i.e. files ending in .Z), since the uncompression
algorithm is not patented.
To extract sources that are in files ending in `.tar.gz' you can use the command
gzip -d < foo.tar.gz | tar xf -
where foo.tar.gz is the name of the file.