you can use pbzip2 with the -d
flag to "decompress",
from the manpage:
pbzip2 -d myfile.tar.bz2
This example will decompress the file "myfile.tar.bz2" into the
decompressed file "myfile.tar". It will use the autodetected # of
processors (or 2 processors if autodetect not supported).
After decompressing, you need to untar the file with
tar xf myfile.tar
A tar file is just a container, to which you can apply multiple compression algorithms, for example, you can have a ".tar.gz" or a ".tar.bz2" which both have different compression algorithms applied. So pbzip2 will only uncompress the archive but it will not extract the files, use tar
to extract the files. Tar shouldn't take long since the archive is already uncompressed and it will just extract the files. (note that we are Not using the 'z' flag or the 'j' flag in the tar command, which they indicate that we also want to decompress the file)