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.bz2

Low risk

Bzip2 compressed file

A Burrows-Wheeler compression format. Denser than gzip but slower; xz and 7-Zip have largely overtaken it in modern Linux distributions.

MIME types

  • application/x-bzip2

Category

archive

What opens this file

  • bzip2 CLI
  • 7-Zip
  • The Unarchiver
  • tar -xjf

How to open by OS

Windows

  • 7-Zip.

Mac

  • The Unarchiver, Keka, or the `bzip2` CLI.

Linux

  • Standard `bzip2`; paired with tar as `tar.bz2`.

Ios

  • iZip, Documents by Readdle.

Android

  • ZArchiver.

Safety notes

  • bz2 itself is low-risk, though high-compression 'bomb' files can DoS extractors the way zip bombs do.

Common mistakes

  • Extracting .tar.bz2 with only bzip2 leaves a plain tar behind — two-step extraction, or use tar -xjf.
  • bzip2 compresses a single stream. Use tar to bundle multiple files before compression.

Related extensions

References