Sample BZIP2 files for testing decompression — free, CC0

A bzip2 file is a single compressed stream, not an archive. There is no container, no entry list and no filename inside it: one payload goes in, one stream comes out. Tools that treat every compressed file as an archive get this wrong, which is exactly what makes it useful.

bz2/lorem-1mb.txt.bz2 compresses exactly 1,000,000 bytes of Lorem Ipsum, so the compression ratio you measure is the ratio of ordinary prose rather than of random noise or of a file padded to a round size. Because the input is text, the output is substantially smaller than the input, and the difference is a realistic figure to show in a progress bar or a quota calculation.

Use it to test decompression paths, content-encoding handling, and anything that has to tell a compressed stream apart from an archive it can list. Related formats: GZIP, XZ, ZSTD and TAR, which is the container the streams usually wrap.

curl -O https://loremfile.dev/bz2/lorem-1mb.txt.bz2

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