Question

77

Why I can't uncompress a .bz2 file using tar?

rated 0 times [ 77] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 55592 / 3 Years ago, sat, june 5, 2021, 5:19:46

So I have this wikipedia dump sized at about 10gb and named as "enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2".
I have been trying the following commands in the terminal to unzip the dump:

tar jxf enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2

And

tar xvf enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2

But both of them returns the following error

tar: This does not look like a tar archive

tar: Skipping to next header

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motivengry

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3 Years ago

answered 3 Years ago odenanno · Accepted Answer

You can't use the tar command because the archive isn't a .tar.* file. To uncompress a bzip2 file, use the following command (this won't preserve the original .bz2 file):

bzip2 -d enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2

If you want to extract it and keep the original, run this command:

bzip2 -dk enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2

Source: https://superuser.com/questions/480950/how-to-decompress-a-bz2-file