In the previous two examples, we created a standard UNIX pipeline to view and extract files from our archive file. Since tar was called with the f - option, it read tar data from stdin, rather than trying to read data from a file on disk.

If you used the pipeline method to try to extract the contents of your archive and your system complained that bzip2 couldn't be found, it's possible that bzip2 isn't installed on your system. You can download the sources to bzip2 from http://sourceware.cygnus.com/bzip2. After installing the bzip2 sources (by following this tutorial), you'll then be able to unpack and install the application you wanted to install in the first place :)