1. The pbzip2 command will compress a single file:

        pbzip2 myfile.tar

pbzip2 detects the number of cores on your system and compresses myfile.tar, to myfile.tar.bz2.

2. To compress and archive multiple files or directories, we use pbzip2 in combination with tar, as follows:

        tar cf sav.tar.bz2 --use-compress-prog=pbzip2 dir

Alternatively, this can be used:

        tar -c directory_to_compress/ | pbzip2 -c > myfile.tar.bz2

3. Extracting a pbzip2 compressed file is as follows:

The -d flag will decompress a file:

        pbzip2 -d myfile.tar.bz2

A tar archive can be decompressed and extracted using a pipe:

        pbzip2 -dc myfile.tar.bz2 | tar x