How to open/uncompress a .tar.bz2 file

This article will show you how to open/uncompress/unarchive a .tar.bz2 file in Linux. First a little background… bz2 or BZIP2, is a more efficient compression format than ZIP, however it takes longer to comrpess the file. Another difference is that a BZIP2 can only be used to compress a single file, not a directory of files. Therefore, bz2 is often used in conjunction with TAR to first archive a group of files before it is compressed.

To Open/Uncompress a .tar.bz2 File

tar xvfj filename.tar.bz2