Hi Sean, You might consider using Lha. It does the same as tar and bzip2 together (although you can disable compression). It has a simple syntax. You can also view the contents of the archive and even extract one single file from it.
Example (suppose I have a 'work' dir with a.o. the file 'abc' in it): cd ~ lha a work.lha work/ (pack and compress entire dir incl. sub dirs) lha v work.lha ( view contents) lha x work.lha work/abc (extract only the file work/abc from the archive). Manon.