758
tar -vczfx123 ought to do it
(imgs.xkcd.com)
img title="I don't know what's worse--the fact that after 15 years of using tar I still can't keep the flags straight, or that after 15 years of technological advancement I'm still mucking with tar flags that were 15 years old when I started."
xtract ze vucking file
Then comes a .tar.bz2 file along and you're screwed. xtract je vucking file?
Pro tip: -z, -j are not needed by tar anymore since many years, tar will autodetect what compression was used if your distro is anything remotely modern.
You still might want to do something like alias pbtar='tar --use-compress-prog=pbzip2 to easily use pbzip2 - unless you have an ancient system that'll speed things up significantly. And even if you don't it'd be nice to use it for creation - to utilize more than one core the archive needs to be created for parallel extraction.