unzip command_examples

unzip – list, test and extract compressed files in a ZIP archive

To use unzip to extract all members of the archive letters.zip into the current directory and subdirectories below it, creating any subdirectories as necessary:

unzip letters

To extract all members of letters.zip into the current directory only:

unzip -j letters

To test letters.zip, printing only a summary message indicating whether the archive is OK or not:

unzip -tq letters

To test all zipfiles in the current directory, printing only the summaries:

unzip -tq \*.zip

(The backslash before the asterisk is only required if the shell expands wildcards, as in Unix; double quotes could have been used instead, as in the source examples below.) To extract to standard output all members of letters.zip whose names end in .tex, auto-converting to the local end-of-line convention and piping the output into more(1):

unzip -ca letters \*.tex | more

To extract the binary file paper1.dvi to standard output and pipe it to a printing program:

 

unzip -p articles paper1.dvi | dvips

 

To extract all FORTRAN and C source files–*.f, *.c, *.h, and Makefile–into the /tmp directory:

unzip source.zip "*.[fch]" Makefile -d /tmp

(the double quotes are necessary only in Unix and only if globbing is turned on). To extract all FORTRAN and C source files, regardless of case (e.g., both *.c and *.C, and any makefile, Makefile, MAKEFILE or similar):

 

unzip -C source.zip "*.[fch]" makefile -d /tmp

 

To extract any such files but convert any uppercase MS-DOS or VMS names to lowercase and convert the line-endings of all of the files to the local standard (without respect to any files that might be marked “binary”):

 

unzip -aaCL source.zip "*.[fch]" makefile -d /tmp

 

To extract only newer versions of the files already in the current directory, without querying (NOTE: be careful of unzipping in one timezone a zipfile created in another–ZIP archives other than those created by Zip 2.1 or later contain no timezone information, and a “newer” file from an eastern timezone may, in fact, be older):

unzip -fo sources

To extract newer versions of the files already in the current directory and to create any files not already there (same caveat as previous example):

unzip -uo sources

To display a diagnostic screen showing which unzip and zipinfo options are stored in environment variables, whether decryption support was compiled in, the compiler with which unzip was compiled, etc.:

unzip -v

In the last five examples, assume that UNZIP or UNZIP_OPTS is set to -q. To do a singly quiet listing:

unzip -l file.zip

To do a doubly quiet listing:

unzip -ql file.zip

(Note that the “.zip” is generally not necessary.) To do a standard listing:

unzip --ql file.zip
or
unzip -l-q file.zip
or
unzip -l--q file.zip

(Extra minuses in options don’t hurt.)