Extract a tar.gz File in a Single Command [Unix]

The obvious way to extract a tar.gz archive is using the following two commands:

sharfah@starship:~> gunzip foo.tar.gz
sharfah@starship:~> tar xvf foo.tar

This is how you can achieve the same thing, but in a single command:

sharfah@starship:~> gunzip -c foo.tar.gz | tar xvf -

or alternatively:

sharfah@starship:~> gunzip < foo.tar.gz | tar xvf -

Both commands write the data produced from the gunzip command to standard out (-c in the first example and using < in the second). The output is then piped into the tar command. The "-" represents standard input.

Creating a tar.gz:
A tar.gz file is normally created using two commands as follows:

sharfah@starship:~> tar cvf foo.tar foodir
sharfah@starship:~> gzip foo.tar

Again, there is a single command to do the same thing:

sharfah@starship:~> tar cvf - foodir | gzip > foo.tar.gz