extract archived .bz2 files inside a .tar archive with a single command

Question

i need to decompress .bz2 files inside a .tar archive (two step decompression)

For example:

requested_files_1.tar

has multiple .bz2 files inside.

How can I extract them with a single command in linux. I have tried this but it does n't work.

tar -xvf requested_files_1.tar | bzip2 -d

Answer 1

Your pipe doesn't work because tar isn't extracting the files to stdout, it's just listing them. bzip2 therefore tries to decompress the list of filenames as plain text, which of course, is not a compressed file's contents (i.e., it's using the plain text as the contents of the file to be extracted).

In order to use the output from tar xvf as a list of filenames for bzip2 to extract, you can do the following:

bzip2 -d $(tar xvf requested_files_1.tar)

The v option for tar here is required to list the extracted files for bzip2.

Answer 2

Sounds like a duplicate of

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4367/extracting-nested-zip-files

So your script would be something like this:

#!/bin/sh

for f in `ls *.tar` ; do
    dir="${f%.*}"
    mkdir "$dir"
    cd $dir
    tar -xf "../$f"
    bunzip2 *.bz2
    cd ..
done