Extract a bz2 or bzip2 file

Contributed by qmchenry July 11, 2006  
Tagged: UNIX

You’ve downloaded a file that ends in .bz2. Now what do you do? This recipe describes how to work with these files.

A file with an extension of bz2 has been compressed with the bzip2 program. Programs like bzip2 and gzip work on a single file so they are not themselves an archive of multiple files like a zip archive can be.

To extract the file file.bz2, use

bzip2 -d file.bz2


This will an uncompressed file in the current directory called ‘file’ and will delete the original bz2 archive. If you want to keep the original file, add the -k option like

bzip2 -dk file.bz2


A useful option for bzip2 is the -c switch which causes bzip2 to write the uncompressed output to stdout which can easily be redirected to another option. For instance, to search the compressed file file.bz2 for the string tech-recipes, use:

bzip2 -dc file2.bz2 | grep tech-recipes