Bash – How to find corrupted archive files

This will extract all the zip files into the current directory, excluding any zipfiles contained within them.

find . -type f -name '*.zip' -exec unzip -- '{}' -x '*.zip' \;

Although this extracts the contents to the current directory, not all files will end up strictly in this directory since the contents may include subdirectories.

If you actually wanted all the files strictly in the current directory, you can run

find . -type f -mindepth 2 -exec mv -- '{}' . \;

Note: this will clobber files if there are two with the same name in different directories.

If you want to recursively extract all the zip files and the zips contained within, the following extracts all the zip files in the current directory and all the zips contained within them to the current directory.

while [ "`find . -type f -name '*.zip' | wc -l`" -gt 0 ]
do
    find . -type f -name "*.zip" -exec unzip -- '{}' \; -exec rm -- '{}' \;
done

Ok, let's apply the unix philosophy. What are the components of this task?

• Text search: you need a tool to search text in a file, such as grep.
• Recursive: you need a tool to go looking for files in a directory tree, such as find.
• Archives: you need a tool to read them.

Most unix programs operate on files. So to operate easily on archive components, you need to access them as files, in other words you need to access them as directories.

The AVFS filesystem presents a view of the filesystem where every archive file /path/to/foo.zip is accessible as a directory ~/.avfs/path/to/foo/zip#. AVFS provides read-only access to most common archive file formats.

mountavfs
find ~/.avfs"$PWD" \( -name '*.zip' -o -name '*.tar.gz' -o -name '*.tgz' \) \
     -exec sh -c '
                  find "$0#" -name "*.pm" -exec grep "$1" {\} +
                 ' {} 'Test::Version' \;
fusermount -u ~/.avfs   # optional

Explanations:

• Mount the AVFS filesystem.
• Look for archive files in ~/.avfs$PWD, which is the AVFS view of the current directory.
• For each archive, execute the specified shell snippet (with $0 = archive name and $1 = pattern to search).
• $0# is the directory view of the archive $0.
• {\} rather than {} is needed in case the outer find substitutes {} inside -exec ; arguments (some do it, some don't).
• Optional: finally unmount the AVFS filesystem.

Or in zsh ≥4.3:

mountavfs
grep 'Test::Version' ~/.avfs$PWD/**/*.(tgz|tar.gz|zip)(e\''
     reply=($REPLY\#/**/*.pm(.N))
'\')

Explanations:

• ~/.avfs$PWD/**/*.(tgz|tar.gz|zip) matches archives in the AVFS view of the current directory and its subdirectories.
• PATTERN(e\''CODE'\') applies CODE to each match of PATTERN. The name of the matched file is in $REPLY. Setting the reply array turns the match into a list of names.
• $REPLY\# is the directory view of the archive.
• $REPLY\#/**/*.pm matches .pm files in the archive.
• The N glob qualifier makes the pattern expand to an empty list if there is no match.