On a minimum Debian 6 (Squeeze) install, I wanted to unpack a tar.bz2 file with "tar -xjf $FILENAME", and got the following error:
[SOLUTION]tar (child): bzip2: Cannot exec: No such file or directory
tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
The problem was quite obvious, and the solution therefore very simple:
The "bzip2" package was not install.
Install it. Then try again