Decompressing bz2 in multiple sub-directories

[Ofnuts]

Thank you for feedback, guys!

I am using SSH to connect to the EC2. To address the connection issue, I initially switched to Chrome (from Opera). That seems to fix things for a time being. Now, once it happened again I added the following to my (i.e., client machine) ssh_config:
Host *
ServerAliveInterval 120

I am going to explore tmux now. Great suggestion :)

If you are using Chrome to download the files, while you have a SSH connection, maybe you should switch to the rsync command:  rsync -c host:/some/path/to/filepattern /some/local/directory/. WIth this you get:

* very robust download
* compressed download (no need to BZIP)
* avoidance of re-downloading existing local files (based on size/time or checksum, depending on options)