752
tar -vczfx123 ought to do it
(imgs.xkcd.com)
img title="I don't know what's worse--the fact that after 15 years of using tar I still can't keep the flags straight, or that after 15 years of technological advancement I'm still mucking with tar flags that were 15 years old when I started."
You still might want to do something like alias pbtar='tar --use-compress-prog=pbzip2 to easily use pbzip2 - unless you have an ancient system that'll speed things up significantly. And even if you don't it'd be nice to use it for creation - to utilize more than one core the archive needs to be created for parallel extraction.