How to unzip a zip file from the Terminal?

Question

Just downloaded a .zip file from the internet. I want to use the terminal to unzip the file. What is the correct way to do this?

Answer 1

If the unzip command isn't already installed on your system, then run:

sudo apt-get install unzip

After installing the unzip utility, if you want to extract to a particular destination folder, you can use:

unzip file.zip -d destination_folder

Answer 2

Here is the command in case you want to extract in present directory

unzip <source_file_path>.zip 

if you want to extract to a particular destination folder, you can use

unzip <sorce_file_path>.zip -d <destination_path>

if there a password you can also use -P

unzip -P <password> <sorce_file_path>.zip 

If the unzip package isn't already installed on your system, then run:

sudo apt-get install unzip

Answer 3

You can use:

unzip file.zip -d somedir

to extract to yourpath/somedir

If you want to extract to an absolute path, use

sudo unzip file.zip -d /somedir

Answer 4

First of all you need to install unzip if it's not installed.

sudo apt-get install unzip

1 - If the File is in the same directory that the terminal is and you want to extract it in the same location.

sudo unzip file.zip

if the file is protected with password use :

sudo ubzip -P file.zip

ans make sure it's -P not -p it's different option

2 - If the file is not in the same directory and you want to extract it in different directory the the terminal is . use :

sudo unzip path/filename.zip -d anotherOrSamePath

if you didn't use -d the file will be extracted to the location that terminal on.

And if there a password you can also use -P .

Answer 5

I prefer bsdtar to unzip/zip. For extracting, they are pretty similar:

bsdtar -x -f /one/two/three/four.zip -C /five
unzip /one/two/three/four.zip -d /five

However for zipping, bsdtar wins. Say you have this input:

/one/two/three/alfa/four.txt
/one/two/three/bravo/four.txt

and want this in the zip file:

alfa/four.txt
bravo/four.txt

This is easy with bsdtar:

bsdtar -a -c -f four.zip -C /one/two/three alfa bravo

zip does not have the -d option like unzip, so you have no way to achieve the above unless you cd first.

Answer 6

Here is the detailed description of options that I find useful:

Command: sudo unzip -[option] zip-path.  
                    -l List archive files.  
                    -t Test archive files with cyclic redundancy check.  
                    -u update the existing files.  
                    -z archive comment.  

Answer 7

Using scripting tools: Perl and Python

Many answers here mention tools that require installation, but nobody has mentioned that two of Ubuntu's scripting languages, Perl and Python, already come with all the necessary modules that allow you to unzip a zip archive, which means you don't need to install anything else. Just use either of the two scripts presented below to do the job. They're fairly short and can even be condensed to a one-liner command if we wanted to.

Python

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys
from zipfile import PyZipFile
for zip_file in sys.argv[1:]:
    pzf = PyZipFile(zip_file)
    pzf.extractall()

Usage:

./pyunzip master.zip

Perl

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use Archive::Extract;
foreach my $filepath (@ARGV){
    my $archive = Archive::Extract->new( archive => $filepath );
    $archive->extract;
}

Usage:

./perlunzip master.zip

Answer 8

You can simply use unzip.

Install it: apt-get install unzip

And use it: unzip file.zip

Answer 9

A more useful tool is 7z, which zips and unzips a range of compression formats, notably lzma, usually the protocol offering the highest compression rates.

This command installs 7z:

sudo apt-get install p7zip-full

This command lists the contents of the zip:

7z l zipfile.zip

This command extracts the contents of the zip:

7z x zipfile.zip

Answer 10

In case your destination is same as the source zip file, you can simply do:

unzip filename.zip