Linux in a Nutshell, 6th Edition

Name

bzip2

Synopsis

bzip2 [options] filenames
bunzip2 [options] filenames
bzcat [option] filenames
bzip2recover filename

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 .bz2 extension appended. bunzip2 decompresses each file compressed by bzip2 (ignoring other files, except to print a warning). bzcat decompresses all specified files to standard output, and bzip2recover is used to try to recover data from damaged files.

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.

-dig

Set block size to dig × 100 KB when compressing, where dig is a single digit from 1 to 9. For gzip compatibility, you can use --fast as an alias for −1 and --best for −9, but they have little effect on the compression speed.

-c, --stdout

Compress or decompress to standard output.

-d, --decompress

Force decompression even if invoked by bzip2 or bzcat.

-f, --force

Force overwrite of output files. Default is not to overwrite. Also forces breaking of hard ...