Extracting a *.tar.bz2 file?

ubuntu tar ubuntu-14.04 bzip2 linux

26,427

Solution 1

My solution was to install bsdtar. I don't know why the regular tar wasn't working, but I'm going to file a bug report.

Solution 2

You must be combining the -z and -j compression options. The first uses gzip the second uses bzip. The command tar xjvf will not give you that error.

26,427

supercheetah

Stuff should be here about Linux, and rock climbing. May well be filled in the future, but don't count on it.

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

supercheetah over 1 year
I always used to use this command to extract files from a bzip2 tar ball:
```
tar xjvf file.tar.bz2
```
But right now on Ubuntu 14.04, I get this error:
```
tar: Conflicting compression options
Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information.
```
Did something change or is this a bug?

EDIT: I think there might be a bug. I just tried running it through bunzip2 first, and then extracting everything from the resulting tar ball, and got this:
```
$ tar xvf file.tar
tar (child): pbzip2: Cannot exec: No such file or directory
tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
```
EDIT2: This is what I get after installing pbzip2:
```
$ tar xf file.tar
pbzip2: producer_decompress: *ERROR: when reading bzip2 input stream
Terminator thread: premature exit requested - quitting...
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
```
- David Schwartz almost 10 years
  
  Are you sure someone hasn't aliased tar to tar xz or something like that?
- supercheetah almost 10 years
  
  Pretty certain. I'm pretty paranoid about access on my machine, so it's rather locked down, but I ran unalias tar and got bash: unalias: tar: not found just to sure.
- Bert almost 10 years
  
  If the file were created with -z, you would get bzip2: (stdin) is not a bzip2 file
- supercheetah almost 10 years
  
  Notice that I got that error after running the original file through bunzip2 and then running tar xvf, so the error doesn't even make sense.
- Bert almost 10 years
  
  The pbzip2: cannot exec: no such file or directory leads me to ask if bzip2 is even installed? whereis bzip2 If it is not found, sudo apt-get install bzip2
- supercheetah almost 10 years
  
  @Bert See second edit
supercheetah almost 10 years

I promise I'm not. The command I use is exactly as I've shown it here.
Bert almost 10 years

What does the command file file.tar.bz2 return?
supercheetah almost 10 years

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