tar.bz2 is normally the default extension for bzip2-compressed tar archive. bzip2 compression produces smaller files but requires higher CPU power to compress and extract compared to most other compression algorithms.

You can extract tar.bz2 files using tar command which is included by default in all major Linux distribtions.;

The following example will extract the file to your current directory;

tar xf /path/to/filename.tar.bz2

To extract the file to other directory, use the -C option as the following;

tar xjf /path/to/filename.tar.bz2 -C /path/to/target