How to open tar.bz2 files in Linux

A tar.bz2 file is a bzip2-compressed tar archive, which is a popular file format used in the Linux environment. It is typically used when a higher compression rate is desired at the cost of additional CPU processing time. This file format is an alternative to the more common tar.gz format, offering better compression but at the expense of increased resource usage during the compression and decompression processes.

tar.bz2 archive files can be extracted using the tar command-line utility, which is installed by default in most Linux distributions.

1. Open your preferred terminal application.
2. Verify if the file is a valid bzip2 archive (optional).

   $ file file.tar.bz2
   file.tar.bz2: bzip2 compressed data, block size = 900k

3. Create a folder to store the extracted files (optional).

   $ mkdir destination

4. Navigate to the desired directory where the files will be unpacked (optional).

   cd destination/

5. Use the tar command to extract the files.

   $ tar --extract --bzip2 --verbose --file=/home/user/file.tar.bz2 #Simplified version: tar -xjvf /home/user/archive.tar.gz
   archive/
   archive/subfolder-02/
   archive/subfolder-02/filename-02
   archive/subfolder-02/filename-01
   archive/subfolder-01/
   archive/subfolder-01/filename-02
   archive/subfolder-01/filename-01

6. View the contents of the extracted files.

   $ ls -R
   .:
   archive
   
   ./archive:
   subfolder-01  subfolder-02
   
   ./archive/subfolder-01:
   filename-01  filename-02
   
   ./archive/subfolder-02:
   filename-01  filename-02