A patch may be applied to give tar direct support for bzip2 files. This patch adds the -j option to tar, which is similar to the -z option used for gzip files. Apply the patch by running the following command: patch -Np1 -i ../tar-&tar-patch-version;.patch Prepare Tar to be compiled: ./configure --prefix=/usr --bindir=/bin \     --libexecdir=/usr/bin Continue with compiling the package: make Finish installing the package: make install