tar does bzip
This is embarrassing. For years I’ve extracted .tar.bz2 files by the two-step “bunzip foo.tar.bz2 && tar xf foo.tar” method, but it was annoying that tar didn’t know what to do with .bz2 archives and thus wasn’t as convenient as “tar xzf foo.tar.gz.” Well, last night I discovered tar’s -j option, which does the same thing for bzipped archives as -z does for gzipped archives. Hooray!