Unzip specific directory without creating top directory

Question

I have a ZIP file in which there is a top directory where all the files are stored:

Release/
Release/file
Release/subdirectory/file
Release/subdirectory/file2
Release/subdirectory/file3

I want to extract everything under Release, preserving the directory structure, but when I run this:

unzip archive.zip Release/* -d /tmp

It creates the top Release folder:

/tmp/Release/
/tmp/Release/file
/tmp/Release/subdirectory/file
/tmp/Release/subdirectory/file2
/tmp/Release/subdirectory/file3

How I can extract everything inside Release without creating a Release folder, like this:

/tmp/
/tmp/file
/tmp/subdirectory/file
/tmp/subdirectory/file2
/tmp/subdirectory/file3

Answer 1

In your case, try in target folder:

ln -s Release . && unzip <YourArchive>.zip

Than you need to remove the link you've created:

rm Release

Answer 2

The j flag should prevent folder creation unzip -j archive.zip -d .

From the man page:

-j 

junk paths. The archive's directory structure is not recreated; 
all files are deposited in the extraction directory (by default, the
current one).

Answer 3

Python script for flattening extracted tree

The script written bellow extracts zip file and moves files contained within topmost directory out of it to the current working directory. This quick script is tailored to suit this particular question where there is one single topmost directory that contains all the files, although with a few edits can be made suitable for more general cases.

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys
import os
from zipfile import PyZipFile
for zip_file in sys.argv[1:]:
    pzf = PyZipFile(zip_file)
    namelist=pzf.namelist()
    top_dir = namelist[0]
    pzf.extractall(members=namelist[1:])
    for item in namelist[1:]:
        rename_args = [item,os.path.basename(item)]
        print(rename_args)
        os.rename(*rename_args)
    os.rmdir(top_dir)

Test run

Here's an example of how the script is supposed to work. Everything extracted to current working directory, but source file can be in differet directory altogether. The test is performed on the zip archive of my personal github repository.

$ ls                                                                                   
flatten_zip.py*  master.zip
$ ./flatten_zip.py master.zip                                                          
['utc-time-indicator-master/.gitignore', '.gitignore']
['utc-time-indicator-master/LICENSE', 'LICENSE']
['utc-time-indicator-master/utc-time-indicator', 'utc-time-indicator']
['utc-time-indicator-master/utc_indicator.png', 'utc_indicator.png']
$ ls
flatten_zip.py*  LICENSE  master.zip  utc_indicator.png  utc-time-indicator

Test with source file being in different location

$ mkdir test_unzip
$ cd test_unzip
$ ../flatten_zip.py  ../master.zip                                                     
['utc-time-indicator-master/.gitignore', '.gitignore']
['utc-time-indicator-master/LICENSE', 'LICENSE']
['utc-time-indicator-master/utc-time-indicator', 'utc-time-indicator']
['utc-time-indicator-master/utc_indicator.png', 'utc_indicator.png']
$ ls
LICENSE  utc_indicator.png  utc-time-indicator