Extracting Nested Zip Files – Methods and Tools

filesscriptingzip

I have numerous zip archives, each of which contains a number of zip archives. What is the best way to recursively extract all files contained within this zip archive and its child zip archives, that aren't zip archives themselves?

Best Answer

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

Related Solutions

Grep – Searching for a String in Multiple Zip Files

It is in general not possible to search for content within a compressed file without uncompressing it one way or another. Since zipgrep is only a shellscript, wrapping unzip and egrep itself, you might just as well do it manually:

for file in *.zip; do unzip -c "$file" | grep "ORA-1680"; done

If you need just the list of matching zip files, you can use something like:

for file in *.zip; do
    if ( unzip -c "$file" | grep -q "ORA-1680"); then
        echo "$file"
    fi
done

This way you are only decompressing to stdout (ie. to memory) instead of decompressing the files to disk. You can of course try to just grep -a the zip files but depending on the content of the file and your pattern, you might get false positives and/or false negatives.

Test integrity of ZIP file

unzip -t

Test archive files.

This option extracts each specified file in memory and compares the CRC (cyclic redundancy check, an enhanced checksum) of the expanded file with the original's stored CRC value.

[ source: https://linux.die.net/man/1/unzip ]

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Grep – Searching for a String in Multiple Zip Files

Test integrity of ZIP file

Related Question