How to Compress File using bunzip2 command Linux – bunzip2 Compress Command

bzip2 is a free file compression software used on linux servers, it is used on Linux Servers to compress and decompress files. Type the command “rpm -qa | grep bzip2” to check whether bzip2 package is installed on your linux server.

Log into your Linux Server via SSH as root and do the below steps to compress files using bunzip2
Command to compress the files :

bunzip2 -z Filename

OR

bunzip2 –compress Filename

-z means force compression. Use one of the above commands to compress the files (use either -z or –compress to compress files).

Example is given below :

1.5M file “testfile.txt” is compressed to a small file of size 112K.
 

If website backups are saved as .bz2 format it will save lot of disk space.
 

Use “bunzip2 -kz” option is used to preserve the original files while compressing. Without “-k” option the original input files will be compressed in *.bz2 format.
 
root@server [/usr/local/src]# bunzip2 -kz testfile.txt
root@server [/usr/local/src]# ll
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 1489235 May 11 02:36 testfile.txt
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 112194 May 11 02:36 testfile.txt.bz2