.BZ2 File Extension

A BZ2 file is a file that has been compressed by bzip2, a compression program often found on Unix-based systems. Unlike compressed archives, BZ2 files always contain only a single compressed file. BZ2 files often contain compressed software packages, used to install Linux programs.

Bzip2 is a free file compression utility that compresses files using the Burrows-Wheeler compression algorithm and Huffman encoding. After bzip2 compresses a file, it changes that file's name to filename.bz2.

Unlike .ZIP files and other compressed archives, BZ2 files only ever contain a single compressed file. However, you can use bzip2 to compress multiple files at once, which will create a series of BZ2 files.

You can use bzip2 (multiplatform), Apple Archive Utility (Mac), 7-Zip (Windows), or PeaZip (multiplatform) to extract the compressed file a BZ2 file contains.