This directory of Linux commands is from Linux in a Nutshell, 5th Edition.
Click on any of the 687 commands below to get a description and list of available options. All links in the command summaries point to the online version of the book on Safari Bookshelf.
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bzip2
bzip2 [options] filenames bunzip2 [options] filenames bzcat [option] filenames bzip2recover filenames
File compression and decompression utility similar to gzip, but uses a different algorithm and encoding method to get better compression. bzip2 replaces each file in filenames with a compressed version of the file and with a
Additional related commands include bzcmp, which compares the contents of bzipped files; bzdiff, which creates diff (difference) files from a pair of bzip files; bzgrep, to search them; and the bzless and bzmore commands, which apply the more and less commands to bzip output, as bzcat does with the cat command. See cat, cmp, diff, and grep for information on how to use those commands.
Options
End of options; treat all subsequent arguments as filenames.
Set block size to dig × 100 KB when compressing, where dig is a single digit from 1 to 9.
Compress or decompress to standard output.
Force decompression.
Force overwrite of output files. Default is not to overwrite. Also forces breaking of hard links to files.
Keep input files; don't delete them.
Print license and version information, and exit.
Print only critical messages.
Obsolete flags, occasionally useful in versions earlier than 0.9.5 (which has an improved sorting algorithm) for providing some control over the algorithm.
Use less memory, at the expense of speed.
Check the integrity of the files, but don't actually compress them.
Verbose mode. Show the compression ratio for each file processed. Add more -v's to increase the verbosity.
Force compression, even if invoked as bunzip2 or bzcat.
Perform fast compression, creating a relatively large file. This has no effect on decompression. Higher numbers, up to 9, create progressively better-compressed files. See -9, --best.
Get the best possible compression, although it will take longer.
Examples
To produce two files:
bzip2 fileone.tzt filetwo.ppt
To produce a single compressed file,
bzip2 -c fileone.txt filetwo.txt > output.bz2
The tar command, combined with the -j or --bzip2 option, creates the output file
tar -cjf nutshell.tar.bz2 /home/username/nutshell
