The bzip2 program is another compression program that often does better compression and is becoming quite popular on the Internet. To use it with tar, use the j option. Here are some example usages.
tar cjvf cs253.tar.bz2 cs253
tar xjvf cs253.tar.bz2
The convention is to name the bzipped tarball with the extension .tar.bz2. To unpack a bzipped tarball, we would use the j option as well. For example: