Extract tar the tar.bz2 file error

Question

I tried to extract the tar.bz2 file in Fedora 17 OS. I used the command:

# tar -xvjf myfile.tar.bz2

I received this error message:

Answer 1

I solved it using:

aptitude install bzip2

Answer 2

First you need to install lbzip2 package:

yum install lbzip2

then untar the file

tar file.tar.bz2

Regards

Answer 3

This worked for my file:

binutils-2.15.tar.bz2 (Found at http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/)

bunzip2 your-tar-file.tar.bz2

Your file now looks like this:

your-tar-file.tar

tar xvf your-tar-file.tar

File will finish extracting

Answer 4

You can extract either tar.gz or tar.bz2 with this command:

tar -xvf ~/sometar.tar.bz2

Answer 5

I found the same error as you in CentOS 7. It looks like this:

tar -jxvf target_gile.tar.bz2
 <br>tar (child): bzip2: Cannot exec: No such file or directory
<br>tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now
<br>tar: Child returned status 2
<br>tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

Then I installed bzip2 package : yum install bzip2

After that, I extracted again using this command: tar -jxvf target_gile.tar.bz2

Answer 6

Ensure that you have the bzip2 and bzip2-libs RPMs installed.

It looks like the tar command defers to the bzip2 command which the bzip2 RPM provides (/usr/bin/bzip2). In your case, tar specifically tries to call bzip2 -d to decompress the bzipped archive.

Also, a couple of tips:

• The -v option is not necessary. It just gives verbose output, which means that it lists the files that were extracted from the archive. Most of the time this prints useless data to your terminal.

• As @Skynet said, it is helpful to run the file command on your bzip2 archive to ensure that it is actually in bzip2 format.

• As @Odin said, it appears that you don't need to specify the -j option when extracting the archive, as the tar command seems to be smart enough to figure this out.