Parallel BZIP2 (PBZIP2)

PBZIP2 is a parallel implementation of the bzip2 block-sorting file compressor that uses pthreads and achieves near-linear speedup on SMP machines.

Usage: pbzip2 [-1 .. -9] [-b#cdfhklp#qrtvVz]   

 -b#: where # is the file block size in 100k (default 9 = 900k)
 -c : output to standard out (stdout)
 -d : decompress file
 -f : force, overwrite existing output file
 -h : print this help message
 -k : keep input file, don't delete -l : load average determines max number processors to use -p#: where # is the number of processors (default: autodetect [2])
 -q : quiet mode (default)
 -r : read entire input file into RAM and split between processors
 -t : test compressed file integrity
 -v : verbose mode
 -V : display version info for pbzip2 then exit
 -z : compress file (default)
 -1 .. -9 : set BWT block size to 100k .. 900k (default 900k)

Example: pbzip2 -b15qk myfile.tar
Example: pbzip2 -p4 -r -5 myfile.tar second*.txt
Example: tar -c directory_to_compress/ | pbzip2 -c > myfile.tar.bz2
Example: pbzip2 -d myfile.tar.bz2

Sources:
http://compression.ca/pbzip2/