tar

7-Zip – An excellent archive compressor / decompressor

7-zip is a file compressor with a high ratio of compression. The main features are:

  • High ratio of compression (LZMA algorithm)
  • Compress / decompress: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
  • Unzip: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z
  • Robust encryption: AES-256 for 7z and ZIP formats
  • Allows to create self-extracting archives (SFX)
  • Command line version
  • Integration with File Roller, XArchiver and XArchive
  • Multi-platform
  • Multi-language

Failed to decompress file .tar.bz2

Debian GNU/Linux

If when you try to unpack a file .tar.bz2, you get the following error messages:

tar (child): bzip2: Cannot exec: No such file or directory
tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2

You must solve it by installing the bzip2 package

# apt-get -y install bzip2

Further reading

– man tar

Error decompressing .tar.xz file

Debian GNU/Linux

When you try to unpack a .tar.xz file you get the following error messages:

tar (child): xz: Cannot exec: No such file or directory
(child) tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now