Decompressing compressed archive files

There are numerous compression/archive utilities available and in use on the ‘net. Here are some scratchpad notes for using popular options for some of them. Mostly for my reference, but you may find something useful too.

.bz2 files

.bz2 files are handled with the bzip2 utility. bzip2 uses a block sorting algorithm that generally gives greater compression rates than other commonly available compression tools.

To decompress a file:
$ bzip2 -d filename.bz2
or
$ bunzip2 filename.bz2

To decompress a file and keep a replica of the original:
$ bzip2 -dk filename.bz2
or
$ bunzip2 -k filename.bz2

To decompress a file and send output to stdout:
$ bzip -dc filename.bz2
or
$ bunzip2 -c filename.bz2
or
$ bzcat filename.bz2