bunzip / bzip2 an entire directory instead of individual files in the directory

Question

With gunzip its simply zip -r archive.zip my_dir/. Am failing to find an equivalent command for bunzip. Some if found are zipping individual files inside of a directory, but i want one .bzip2 archive.

Answer 1

gunzip is not zip. zip is an archiver which handles files and directories. gzip/gunzip only compresses a single file or stream of data.

bzip2 is just like gzip, and only compresses a single file or stream of data. For both gzip and bzip2, it is traditional to use tar as the archiving program, and compressing the output. In fact that is such a common idiom that tar has options to invoke gzip or bzip2 for you. Do a man tar.