tar.bz2 is the default extension for bzip2-compressed tar archive. It is used instead of the typical tar.gz format when a higher compression rate is needed at the expense of CPU time required to compress and decompress an archive of this format.
Related: How to extract tar.gz file in Linux
tar.bz2 archive files can be extracted using the tar command at the terminal, which is included in most Linux distributions.
$ file file.tar.bz2 file.tar.bz2: bzip2 compressed data, block size = 900k
$ mkdir destination
cd destination/
$ 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
$ ls -R .: archive ./archive: subfolder-01 subfolder-02 ./archive/subfolder-01: filename-01 filename-02 ./archive/subfolder-02: filename-01 filename-02
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