I tried a majority of the formats (gzip, etc.) to extract a zip file with tar, and when I became frustrated enough to Google for it, I found no way to extract a zip file with tar and only recommendations to use zip or unzip. As a matter of fact, my Linux system doesn't even have a zip utility, but only unzip (leaving me to wonder why this is the main recommended option). Of course unzip worked, solving my problem, but why can't tar extract zip files? Perhaps I should instead be asking, what is the difference between zip and the compression methods supported by tar?