Compress command output by piping to bzip2

Question

Is it possible to pipe a command output to bzip2 for compression to an output file?

Something along the lines of:

cat somefile.txt | bzip2 --output somefile.txt.bz2

I don't recommend using bzip2, it's slower and has worse compression than xz — anna328p, Mar 03 '19 at 00:31

score 22 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 01 '19 at 18:48

22

You can do this with bzip2's -c option:

       -c --stdout
              Compress or decompress to standard output.

For example:

command | bzip2 -c > some.txt.bz2

And to decompress:

bzip2 -dc < some.txt.bz2 | less

answered Mar 01 '19 at 18:48

Michael Hampton

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score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 01 '19 at 18:52

6

The bzip2 utility will compress stdin but won't write it to stdout if stdout is a terminal. You can though use standard output redirection techniques.

command | bzip2 >somefile.txt.bz2

and to read it the usual tools are available e.g.

bzless somefile.txt.bz2

answered Mar 01 '19 at 18:52

user9517

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Strangely the documentation is pretty good for bzip2. – user9517 Mar 01 '19 at 19:01

Compress command output by piping to bzip2

2 Answers2