need help to extract tar.bz2

[bob2044]

hi ,
I need a help to extract .tar.bz2 in ubuntu .
Regards,

[gits]

what is the problem? in a console you might use:

tar xjvf your_file_name.tar.bz2
 

but in ubuntu you should have the typical gnome-archive-manager as gui-tool for that? or do you use another window-manager?

kind regards

[numberwhun]

@bob2044
Unfortunately, the tar commands 'z' option only unzips .gz extentions. To unzip this, you will have to install bunzip2 if not already installed. You would then do the following:

bunzip2 file.tar.bz2
tar -xvf file.tar
 

If its not installed, simply do the following:

sudo apt-cache search bunzip
 

Search the output for the name of the bunzip2 package and then do:

sudo apt-get install <package name>
 

Regards,

Jeff

[gits]

the tar man page refers to the j option i showed above to handle the .bz2 files ... or am i wrong? i often used the above shown command to extract such files ...?

[micmast]

To extract tar.bz2 you can use: tar -jxvf (v for viewing the content while extracting)
To extract .tar.gz you can use : tar -zxvf (again the v is for viewing the content)
works for me everytime

[gits]

yep :) ... and a note: the dash is not really required anymore ... even when i often use it since i always used it too :)

kind regards

[numberwhun]

Well, I will have to play with the -j option. To tell you the truth, I hadn't explored the man page in a while. If that works, sweet! And thanks for the tip. :)

Regards,

Jeff

[gits]

no problem ... it should work :)

kind regards

[sumittyagi]

If i want to tar and zip a directory, then can I use the following command?

tar -zcvf <directory_name> tar_file_name

and also, will it tar and then zip the tar file, or it will zip all the files in the directory and then tar?

[gits]

i think the filename should be before the folder to compress (at least i used it on my ubuntu machine that way and the man-page even shows that as example) and to the question - basicly i think it first creates the tar-archive and then uses zip to compress the archive. it is called solid compression ... or similar :) ... you might have a look here for a bit more info ...

kind regards

[numberwhun]

@gits
You are completely correct gits. The f option is to specify the file name to output to, thus, the name that immediately follows it should be the output file. After that, you can list everything you need to include in the file.

[Plater]

It will tar then zip.
Roughly: TAR is the "tape archive" format, meaning it lines up all the files sequencialy (no fragmenting) for when backups where done to a tape drive (Think like an ISO file for cds now). The gz and bz2 are compressions applied after the fact.

[sumittyagi]

Thanks everybody for the useful information and a very nice duscussion!