1. How can I untar or unzip multiple tarballs at once?

As the tar command was originally designed to read from and write to tape devices (tar - Tape ARchiver), you can specify only filenames to put inside an archive or to extract out of an archive (e.g. tar x myfileonthe.tape). There is an option to tell tar, that the archive is not on some tape, but in a file: -f. This option takes exactly one argument, the filename of the file containing the archive. All other (following) filenames are taken like mentioned before: archive members:

    tar -x -f backup.tar myfile.txt
    # OR (more common syntax IMHO)
    tar xf backup.tar myfile.txt

Now there's a common mistake, imagine a directory containing the following archive-files you want to extract all by one:

    $ ls
    backup1.tar backup2.tar backup3.tar

Maybe you think of tar xf *.tar, let's see:

    $ tar xf *.tar
    tar: backup2.tar: Not found in archive
    tar: backup3.tar: Not found in archive
    tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

What happened? The Shell replaced your *.tar by the matching filenames, you really wrote:

    tar xf backup1.tar backup2.tar backup3.tar

And taken the statements from the beginning, it means: "extract the files backup2.tar and backup3.tar from the archive backup1.tar", which will of course only succeed, when there are such filenames stored in the archive.

The solution is relatively easy: extract the contents of all archives ONE BY ONE. As we use a UNIX shell and we are lazy, we do that with a loop:

    for tarname in *.tar; do
      tar xf "$tarname"
    done

What happens? The for-loop will iterate through all filenames matching *.tar and call tar xf for each of them. That way you extract all archives one-by-one and you even do it automagically.

The second common archive type in these days is ZIP. The command to extract contents from a ZIP file is unzip (who would have guessed that!). The problem here is the very same: unzip takes only one option specifying the ZIP-file. So, you solve it the very same way:

    for zipfile in *.zip; do
      unzip "$zipfile"
    done

Not enough? Ok. There's another variant, unzip can do that: It takes shell-like patterns to specify the ZIP-file names. And to avoid interpretion of those patterns by the shell, you need to quote them. unzip itself and NOT the shell will interpret *.zip in this case:

    unzip "*.zip"
    # OR, to make more clear what we do:
    unzip \*.zip