Error Context

When attempting to install Anaconda3 on a minimal Linux server (such as CentOS or RHEL), the installation script may terminate unexpectedly. The process fails during the decompression phase, returning a series of errors indicating that the system cannot locate the required utility to handle the archive.

Anaconda3-5.3.1-Linux-x86_64.sh: line 353: bunzip2: command not found
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

Root Cause Analysis

The installation bundle is compressed using bzip2. The script relies on the bunzip2 utility to decompress the files before extracting them. This utility is part of the bzip2 package. On minimal server installations, this package is often omitted to save space, leading to the 'command not found' error.

Users might intuitively try to install the missing command directly using its name:

yum install bunzip2

However, this results in a failure as no repository provides a package named 'bunzip2':

Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
 * base: mirrors.aliyun.com
 * extras: mirrors.aliyun.com
 * updates: mirrors.aliyun.com
No package bunzip2 available.
Error: Nothing to do

This occurs because bunzip2 is not a standalone package. It is a symbolic link or an alias to the bzip2 executable. Specifically, running bunzip2 is functionally equivalent to executing bzip2 -d.

Solution

To resolve the dependency issue, install the bzip2 package using the package manager.

yum install bzip2

The system will locate the correct package and proceed with the installation:

Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package bzip2.x86_64 0:1.0.6-13.el7 will be installed
--> Finished Dependency Resolution

Dependencies Resolved

===================================================================================
 Package          Arch              Version                  Repository       Size
===================================================================================
Installing:
 bzip2            x86_64            1.0.6-13.el7             base             52 k

Transaction Summary
===================================================================================
Install  1 Package

Total download size: 52 k
Installed size: 82 k
Is this ok [y/d/N]: y
Downloading packages:
bzip2-1.0.6-13.el7.x86_64.rpm                               |  52 kB  00:00:00
Running transaction check
Running transaction test
Transaction test succeeded
Running transaction
  Installing : bzip2-1.0.6-13.el7.x86_64                                       1/1
  Verifying  : bzip2-1.0.6-13.el7.x86_64                                       1/1

Installed:
  bzip2.x86_64 0:1.0.6-13.el7

Complete!

Once the installation is finished, execute the Anaconda shell script again. The installation process will now detect the decompression tool and complete successfully.