How to Zip / Unzip on Linux

About

The zip manager in Linux

Compression:

take advantage of redundancy between files.

split archives:

storing a large archive on multiple removable media.
split big file ?

How to

List

List the content

unzip -l myFile.zip

Example:

/usr/bin/unzip -l p25797429_111190_Linux-x86-64.zip

Archive:  p25797429_111190_Linux-x86-64.zip
  Length     Date   Time    Name
 --------    ----   ----    ----
        0  04-12-17 08:55   25797429/
    68000  04-12-17 08:55   25797429/p21517672_111190_Generic.zip
318682896  04-12-17 08:30   25797429/p25710656_111190_Linux-x86-64.zip
545626254  04-12-17 08:55   25797429/p25818798_111190_Generic.zip
456596466  04-12-17 08:33   25797429/p25710602_111190_Linux-x86-64.zip
182417792  04-12-17 08:55   25797429/p25738050_111190_Generic.zip
   114984  04-15-17 20:38   25797429/README.html
1052740398  04-12-17 08:55   25797429/p25710734_111190_Generic.zip
 91360658  04-12-17 08:55   25797429/p24346370_111190_Generic.zip
1036787935  04-12-17 08:36   25797429/p25796832_111190_Linux-x86-64.zip
 --------                   -------
3684395383                   10 files

Unzip all files except the root directory

When download zip archive, you get in the created archive in the root a single directory with the name of the archive. If you want to skip its creation, you can:

unzip and move
use another tool such as the bsdtar command line tool. Example on debian

apt-get install -y libarchive-tools 
bsdtar --strip-components=1 -xvf file.zip

where --strip-components sets the number of part to be deleted from the path.

Unzip all zip files of a directory

/usr/bin/unzip \*.zip

..........
  ..........
  inflating: 13952743/files/common/script_handlers/MDS_handler.py
  creating:  13952743/files/clone/
  creating:  13952743/files/clone/provision/
  inflating: 13952743/files/clone/provision/adf_t2p_registration.xml
  inflating: 13952743/files/clone/provision/adf-t2p-cloner.jar
  inflating: 13952743/README.txt

9 archives were successfully processed.

Unzip only a sub-directory of the zip file

The root directory is still preserved 'my/sub/folder', you need to move it. The -j option flatten the whole structure and is not what you want

unzip file.zip 'my/sub/folder' -d /dest/dir

Zip a directory recursively

/usr/bin/zip -r targetFile.zip ./targetDir/*

in the background

nohup zip -r file.zip directory/* &

You can monitor it with the command:

jobs

or with this until statement (You need to change the pid)

pid=22018
count=0
while kill -0 $pid 2> /dev/null; do
    count=$(( $count + 1 ))
    echo "${count} - Process is running"
    sleep 10
done
echo "${count} - Process has exited"

Zip a file

zip targetFile.zip /myFile

Unzip in a target directory

unzip file.zip -d myTargetDirectory

Zip only a subset of a files

Under Unix, the option -@ file list can be used to powerful effect in conjunction with the find command.

For example, to archive all the C source files in the current directory and its subdirectories:

find . -name "*.[ch]" -print | zip source -@

Zip a subset of files selected by attributes (date/name…)

With the find

Example: zip all files modified the last 7 days

find . -mtime -7  -type f -print | zip lastSevenDaysModifiedFiles.zip -@

where:

. means start the search from the current directory
-mtime -7 means select all files modified from 7 days ago.
-@ tells zip to read files from the input

Support

unzip: cannot find or open

You may get this kind of message:

unzip:  cannot find or open ./p25797429_111190_Linux-x86-64.zip, ./p25797429_111190_Linux-x86-64.zip.zip or ./p25797429_111190_Linux-x86-64.zip.ZIP.

Just try to use another unzip application.

Example:

/usr/bin/unzip