tar.gz is de facto standard of file compressing on unix like system. why? powerful and cheap. I got this from here the command to make it on one line.

tar cvf - foodir | gzip > foo.tar.gz

Option c stand for -c, --create create a new archive and

v stand for -v, --verbose verbosely list files processed and

f stand for -f, --file=ARCHIVE use archive file or device ARCHIVE

To make better compression use option -9 on gzip. Here is my version of one line command to make .tar.gz package.

tar cvf - foodir | gzip -9 > foo.tar.gz