One line scripts to copy, tar and compress files

To untar and unzip a compressed tar archive in one command

gunzip < file.tar.gz | tar xvf -

To tar and zip files in one command

tar cvf - filelist | gzip -c > file.tar.gz 

To tar files and directories on one server, copy the tar archive to another server

and extract into the remote directory in one go and on the fly

tar cpf - * | ssh user@node2 'cd /oracle; tar xpf -'