Extract tar the tar.bz2 file error

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.

I solved it using:

aptitude install bzip2

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

You may need to install the bzip2 on your system.

yum -y install bzip2

I got the same problem . I have two server.

A: CentOS 7.6 Min install

B: Fedora 29 Workstation

On B:create a tarball with:

tar -jcvf  XXX.tar.bz2   /Path_to_my_dir

Then scp this tarball to A server to decrompress it, but when I want to decompression it I got the same error.Finally it turns out that, tar could work with bzip2 but you have to install it first .