Installing tar.bz2 help

[Patrick Doyle]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 1:41 PM, Edwin McGuire
<mcguiresmain at emypeople.com> wrote:
>> Thanks for your help Patrick
> I know  ( I think) theres a diff between tar.gz & tar.bz2, is there a help
> file in Karmic i can look at to learn more.
> Thanks Ed

This stuff I know the answers to... VirtualBox, what's on some random
CD included with a magazine, etc... I don't know the answers to.

.gz is the common file extension for data that's been compressed with gzip.

.bz2 is the common file extension for data that's been compressed with bzip2

.tar is the common file extension for a file containing a "tape
archive" (man tar) of a set of files and directories.

blah.tar.gz typically contains a "tape archive" (frequently referred
to as a "tarball") that's been compressed with gzip.

blah.tar.bz2 typically contains a tarball that's been compressed with bzip2.

Since compressing the output of tar is such a common operation, GNU
tar supports an option for compressing (or uncompressing) on the fly.

$ tar -xzf blah.tar.gz

says to extract (-x) files from a tape archive, but don't actually try
to access the tape drive, instead access the archive that's stored in
a file (-f) named "blah.tar.gz"; oh yeah, uncompress the file using
gzip (-z) first.

$ tar -xjf blah.tar.bz2

says the same thing, except uncompress the file using bunzip2 (-j)
first.  Both "-b" and "-B" were taken, so they decided that "-j" was
close enough to mean "bzip2" :-)

I don't know if there's a help file in Karmic that would explain the
difference between the file extensions.  Most of that is lore that has
been passed down from one generation to the next.   The man page for
tar will tell you all about the different options.

--wpd