To create a compressed tar archive (from /home):
tar zcvf myarchive.tar.gz /home
To list the contents of a compressed tar archive:
tar --list -zf myarchive.tar.gz
To extract an archive:
tar zxvf myarchive.tar.gz
To extract a particular file from a compressed tar archive:
tar zxvf myarchive.tar.gz "somefilename.pdf"