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The gzip and bzip2 commands are functionally similar, as they compress and decompress files, using different algorithms. The gzip command uses the Lempel-Ziv algorithm, found in some Microsoft compression algorithms. The bzip2 command uses the Burrows-Wheeler block sorting algorithm . While they both work well, the bzip2 command makes a big file a bit smaller.
For example, either of the two following commands could be used to compress a big picture file named big.jpg.
# gzip big.jpg
# bzip2 big.jpg
It adds .gz or a .bz2 suffix to the file, compressed to the associated algorithms. With the -d switch, you can use the same commands to reverse the process.
# gzip -d big.jpg.gz
# bzip2 -d big.jpg.bz2
bzip2 compresses files using the Burrows-Wheeler block sorting text compression algorithm, and Huffman coding. The command-line options are deliberately very similar to those of GNU gzip, but they are not identical.
bzip2 expects a list of file names to accompany the command-line flags. Each file is replaced by a compressed version of itself, with the name "original_name.bz2". Each compressed file has the same modification date, permissions, and, when possible, ownership as the corresponding original, so that these properties can be correctly restored at decompression time.
bzip2 and bunzip2 will by default not overwrite existing files. If you want this to happen, specify the -f flag.
If no file names are specified, bzip2 compresses from standard input to standard output. In this case, bzip2 will decline to write compressed output to a terminal, as this would be entirely incomprehensible and therefore pointless.
bunzip2 (or bzip2 -d) decompresses all specified files. Files which were not created by bzip2 will be detected and ignored, and a warning issued. bzip2 attempts to guess the file-name for the decompressed file from that of the compressed file as follows:
filename.bz2 becomes filename
filename.bz becomes filename
filename.tbz2 becomes filename.tar
filename.tbz becomes filename.tar
anyothername becomes anyothername.out
If the file does not end in one of the recognized endings, .bz2, .bz, .tbz2 or .tbz, bzip2 complains that it cannot guess the name of the original file, and uses the original name with .out appended.
As with compression, supplying no filenames causes decompression from standard input to standard output.
bunzip2 will correctly decompress a file which is the concatenation of two or more compressed files. The result is the concatenation of the corresponding uncompressed files. Integrity testing (-t) of concatenated compressed files is also supported.
You can also compress or decompress files to the standard output by giving the -c flag. Multiple files may be compressed and decompressed like this. The resulting outputs are fed sequentially to stdout. Compression of multiple files in this manner generates a stream containing multiple compressed file representations. Such a stream can be decompressed correctly only by bzip2 version 0.9.0 or later. Earlier versions of bzip2 will stop after decompressing the first file in the stream.
bzip2 will read arguments from the environment variables BZIP2 and BZIP, in that order, and will process them before any arguments read from the command line. This gives a convenient way to supply default arguments.
Compression is always performed, even if the compressed file is slightly larger than the original. Files of less than about 100 bytes tend to get larger, since the compression mechanism has a constant overhead in the region of 50 bytes.
As a self-check for your protection, bzip2 uses 32-bit CRCs to make sure that the decompressed version of a file is identical to the original. This guards against corruption of the compressed data, and against undetected bugs in bzip2 (hopefully very unlikely).
The chances of data corruption going undetected is microscopic, about one chance in four billion for each file processed. Be aware, though, that the check occurs upon decompression, so it can only tell you that something is wrong. It can't help you recover the original uncompressed data. You can use bzip2 recover to try to recover data from damaged files.
Return values: 0 for a normal exit, 1 for environmental problems (file not found, invalid flags, I/O errors, &c), 2 to indicate a corrupt compressed file, 3 for an internal consistency error (eg, bug) which caused bzip2 to panic.
