Today's article has us working with .bz2 files...

[KGIII]

You're unlikely to run into .bz2 files all that often - but you'll eventually bump into them. When you do, it's not too hard to decompress them. If you have to respond in kind, that is send a file back, you'll also learn how to create a .bz2 file.

How To: Compress And Decompress .bz2 Files • Linux Tips

In today's article, we're going to discuss how to compress and decompress .bz2 files. This is something you may eventually need to know.

linux-tips.us

Note the warning on the page, in bold text. In hindsight, I should have used a speech bubble type of thing. When you create a file with bzip2, it's a *destructive* process. For reasons unknown to me, it removes the original file. You need to use the -k flag to keep the original file. I have no idea why they did it this way, but here we are.

I do love me some feedback.

 

[wizardfromoz]

I think I would be inclined to either place the -k reference ahead of the other, or insert a warning at the top to read to the end before following the instructions.

There are users who will type in things as they read and press enter before learning that the original is destroyed.

Just my two cents.

 

[KGIII]

That's probably a good idea. You're likely not wrong about people just blindly posting commands they found online when they should probably read everything before trying it.

Fortunately, while it is a destructive process, they can always just decompress the file and put it back - so long as the didn't delete it first. But, that's a good idea for an edit so I'm gonna reword it. It'll have to wait until I have a bucket of coffee, so I'll leave this open as a reminder to do it.

 

[JasKinasis]

I’ve rarely seen plain bz2 files.
.tar.bz2 is more common.

The fact that it’s commonly used with tar may also explain why it’s default action is to remove the original file that was being compressed.

When using tar with bz2 - tar creates a .tar file, then uses bz2 to compress the .tar, removing the tar file and leaving only the final .tar.bz2 file.

 

[KGIII]

The fact that it’s commonly used with tar may also explain why it’s default action is to remove the original file that was being compressed.

Good thinking! I hadn't even considered that aspect. And, yeah, they're as rare as hen's teeth but I figured I'd cover them while they were on my mind.

Speaking of which...

I'm pretty stoked. This month the site has had more than 10,000 unique visitors. If you count FTP traffic (and you shouldn't), the site consumed 23 GB of bandwidth. It's really closer to 15 GB, which means I'm now outside of the CDN's free tier and I'm now paying for CDN bandwidth.

At one point, I was stoked and kinda amazed when I'd get 20 visits in a day. I didn't even care if they were unique visits, I was just happy to see people visiting. I've had more than 16,000 visits, which isn't the same as the 10k unique visitors. (These numbers exclude bots and scrapers, inasmuch as AWstats is able to. That's a whole other bunch of bandwidth.)

 

[wizardfromoz]

That's great news, David

 

[KGIII]

That's great news, David

I am REALLY happy with that news. Most sites wouldn't even dream of that much traffic.

It does mean I've added the CDN expense (which means the site should load quickly, regardless of where you are in the world), but I'm okay with that. Ad revenue will cover it. At least it should cover it.

We're still two hours from midnight, in my location, and I'm over 10,300 unique visitors.

I'll see what next month brings. It could go down a bit, but it probably won't go down much. It seems to have some fluctuations but the long-term growth is there. If it goes down this month but increases next month, that's okay.

LOL And I know this kinda seems silly in retrospect...

I used to be excited when I'd get 20 views in a day. I was eager and excited if 20 people visited, or even if 1 person visited 20 times! (I have access to really detailed statistics.) These days, I expect a few hundred visitors a day.

Which is great. It means people are getting the help they need. The vast majority of traffic comes from Google. Bing won't even index my site, but Google sends a lot of the traffic. That's what I wrote the site for - for people to find answers via a search engine. It's not really meant to be read like a blog. It's meant to be indexed and searched for solutions.

The site's probably worth a tidy sum. I don't see me selling it however. LOL I see me keeping on doing what I have been doing. There are a zillion more articles to write.