Possible to combine several bz2 archives into one?

I have several (27) huge (several GB each) bz2 archive files that I need combined into one bz2 archive. Uncompressing them and then creating a new archive from what was just uncompressed is not an option for me, since compressed, all 27 files add up to about 100GB, and uncompressed it's about 5-6TB (ye开发者_开发技巧s that's TERAbytes lol).

Can this be done with some sort of script, or is there even another compression format that allows for this to be done (easier)?

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You can simply concatenate many bz2 files into single bz2 file, like that:

$ cat file1.bz2 file2.bz2 file3.bz2 >resulting_file.bz2

bzip2 and other utilities like lbzip2 will be able to decompress the resulting file as expected.

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If you're willing to burn a few days of CPU, here's one solution with the magical pipe facility of modern UNIX(R) operating systems:

bzip2 -dc file*.bz2 | bzip2 >resulting_file.bz2

... actually, grab lbzip2 version 2.0, and do the same, except with lbzip2, on a multicore:

lbzip2 -dc file*.bz2 | lbzip2 >resulting_file.bz2

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You should flip the question around - you should not try to decompress and then recompress the files, simply make a tar archive of all the separate files - tar is ideal as a container for the separate files.

tar cf tarofbzfiles.tar *.bz2

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You can shorten @lacos's answer with the built in bzcat shorthand for bzip2 -dc and pipe back into bzip2 as usual. Not any more correct than @lacos but a little bit slicker ;)

bzcat file*.bz2 | bzip2 >resulting_file.bz2