Unpacking bz2 with tar

Extremely new to the command line (read: no clue what I'm doing), so I have been trying to teach myself some basic commands by doing some run of the mill stuff. Currently trying to install Marathon on my computer by following the instructions on:

I am trying to run,

tar xjvf AlephOne-20150619.tar.bz2

But I get the error,

bzip2: (stdin) is not a bzip2 file.
tar: Child returned status 2.
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now.

Can anyone tell me what's going on or offer some suggestions as to what I should do? Any help would be much appreciated.

2 Answers

tar: Child returned status 2

Simple : You got a corrupt package. Please delete, and download a new one:

About tar :

From /usr/doc/tar-1.15.1/NEWS , slackware 10.2 , tar version 1.15 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-12-20

• Compressed archives are recognised automatically, it is no longer necessary to specify -Z, -z, or -j options to read them. ( Thus, you can now run `tar tf archive.tar.gz'.)

So with an OS from year 2005 or later you can just do:tar xvf [archive] with tar.gz and tar.bz2. And around 2009, suffix .xz was also added, for lzma compressed archives.

try (no j option). -j is for filter the archive through bzip2

tar -xvf AlephOne-20150619.tar.bz2

to know file format:

file AlephOne-20150619.tar.bz2

source: tar manual