Sample TAR.BZ2 File — Download a Bzip2 Tarball Test Archive
Bzip2-compressed tarball · .tar.bz2, .tbz2 · MIME type application/x-bzip2
Download a sample TAR.BZ2 file — a tarball compressed with bzip2, which compresses tighter than gzip at the cost of speed. It was the preferred format for large source archives in the 2000s and still appears in Linux distributions and scientific datasets.
Extractors that support gzip do not automatically support bzip2; this file checks whether yours does.
Download sample TAR.BZ2 files
| File | Details | Size | Download |
|---|---|---|---|
sample-archive-small.tar.bz2 | 7 entries | 759 KB |
Use these files from the command line or CI
Every URL is stable and CORS-open. Pin the SHA-256 in your test and you will know the moment a fixture changes.
# Download one file curl -O https://pnb-website-bucket.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/samples/archives/tar-bz2/sample-archive-small.tar.bz2 # Verify it (SHA-256 is listed for every file above) shasum -a 256 sample-archive-small.tar.bz2 # Machine-readable index of every sample file curl https://pnb-website-bucket.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/samples/index.json | jq '.files[] | select(.format=="tar-bz2")'
TAR.BZ2 format at a glance
| Full name | Bzip2-compressed tarball |
|---|---|
| Extensions | .tar.bz2, .tbz2 |
| MIME type | application/x-bzip2 |
| Format | POSIX tar inside bzip2 (Burrows–Wheeler) |
| Magic bytes | 42 5A 68 ("BZh") |
What people test with sample TAR.BZ2 files
- Compression-algorithm coverage in extractors
- Legacy source-archive handling
Frequently asked questions
Is bzip2 still worth using?
Rarely for new work — xz and zstd compress better or faster. Support it for reading; produce .tar.gz or .tar.xz.
Are these TAR.BZ2 files safe to download?
Yes. Every file is generated by our own open script from scratch — nothing is scraped or user-uploaded — and contains no scripts, macros or executables. The SHA-256 of each file is published on this page so you can verify what you received.
Can I use the sample TAR.BZ2 files commercially?
Yes. They are free for any purpose, including commercial products, test suites, demos and redistribution, with no attribution required. There is nothing to license and no one to ask.
Can I hotlink these files or use them in CI?
Yes. Every link is a stable direct URL over HTTPS with Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * and long cache headers, so curl, wget, fetch() and test runners can pull them directly. A JSON index of every file is linked from each page (see the command-line section).
Related sample files
Testing a file pipeline? We build them.
Uploads, conversions, previews, document processing and media workflows are the kind of production systems Pine & Birch designs and runs for clients — which is why we needed these files in the first place.
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