extract configure compile

please make it simple...

[mack]

I was just looking for search software...
Just out of curiosity I was looking at a program and was reading up on the instalation. I have only ever installed scripts from perl and php etc etc.
I found this one today ht://dig
is it just me or is this realy as hard as it sounds?

The distribution of ht://Dig is in the form of a gzipped tar file. The name of the file will be something like htdig-3.1.0.tar.gz. To extract, you can use either the GNU tar command as follows:
% tar xzf tarfile.tar.gz
If you do not have GNU tar, you can do the following:
% gunzip -c tarfile.tar.gz ¦ tar xf -

I did a search for GNU tar and from what I could determine it is a form of winzip like aplication but for a non windows platform.

Can someone please explain what these terms mean

% tar xzf tarfile.tar.gz
% gunzip -c tarfile.tar.gz ¦ tar xf -

I was thinking it was a comand promt type thing but really have no idea what or how to use it.
sorry if i sould like a total idiot but I have seen this sort of thing before and it is bugging the hell out of me. :)

[SmallTime]

"tar" stands for tape archiver, an old unix staple archiving program that can use various compression programs, like gzip.
There are a couple of the windows archiving programs that will also handle tar, gzip, bzip2, etc. You also may want to make sure that what you're getting is usuable in a windows environment - much, but not all, of programs delivered in these formats are source code, meant to be compiled for their host environment.