bunzip2 (link to bzip2), bzcat (link to bzip2), bzip2 and bzip2recover Bunzip2 decompresses files that are compressed with bzip2. bzcat (or bzip2 -dc) decompresses all specified files to the standard output. bzip2 compresses files using the Burrows-Wheeler block sorting text compression algorithm, and Huffman coding. Compression is generally considerably better than that achieved by more conventional LZ77/LZ78-based compressors, and approaches the performance of the PPM family of statistical compressors. bzip2recover recovers data from damaged bzip2 files. libbz2.[a,so] libbz2 is the library for implementing lossless, block-sorting data compression using the Burrows-Wheeler algorithm.