Find all files with ‘.log’ extention and make an bzip archive

find /var/log -name '*.log' | tar cv --files-from=- | bzip2 > log.tar.bz2

Decompress a compressed tar archive in bzip2

tar -xvfj archive.tar.bz2tar -xvfj archive.tar.bz2

create a tarball compressed into bzip2

tar -cvfj archive.tar.bz2 dir

extract a tarball into / tmp

tar -xvf archive.tar -C /tmp

Show contents of an archive

tar -tf archive.tar

Create a uncompressed tarball

tar -cvf archive.tar file

How to read a big text file that is tarballed - without extracting the whole thing…

bzcat enwiki-20070802-pages-articles.xml.bz2 | head -10

[tags]tar,zip,bzip,text,read,wikipedia[/tags]