Why I can't uncompress a .bz2 file using tar?

So I have this wikipedia dump sized at about 10gb and named as "enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2". I have been trying the following commands in the terminal to unzip the dump:

tar jxf enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2

And

tar xvf enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2

But both of them returns the following error

tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header

2 Answers

You can't use the tar command because the archive isn't a .tar.* file. To uncompress a bzip2 file, use the following command (this won't preserve the original .bz2 file):

bzip2 -d enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2

If you want to extract it and keep the original, run this command:

bzip2 -dk enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2

Source:

Just use bunzip2:

bunzip2 enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2

And if its a gzip commpressed file:

gunzip enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.gz