How do you recursively unzip archives in a directory and its subdirectories from the Unix command-line?

Question

The unzip command doesn\'t have an option for recursively unzipping archives.

If I have the following directory structure and archives:

/Moth         


        

Answer 1

If you want to extract the files to the respective folder you can try this

find . -name "*.zip" | while read filename; do unzip -o -d "`dirname "$filename"`" "$filename"; done;

A multi-processed version for systems that can handle high I/O:

find . -name "*.zip" | xargs -P 5 -I fileName sh -c 'unzip -o -d "$(dirname "fileName")/$(basename -s .zip "fileName")" "fileName"'

Answer 2

Here's one solution that extracts all zip files to the working directory and involves the find command and a while loop:

find . -name "*.zip" | while read filename; do unzip -o -d "`basename -s .zip "$filename"`" "$filename"; done;

Answer 3

unzip name_of_the_zipfile.zip

worked fine for me, after installing the zip package from Info-ZIP:

sudo apt install -y zip

The above installation is for Debian/Ubuntu/Mint. For other Linux distros, see the second reference below.

References:
http://infozip.sourceforge.net/
https://www.tecmint.com/install-zip-and-unzip-in-linux/

Answer 4

You could use find along with the -exec flag in a single command line to do the job

find . -name "*.zip" -exec unzip {} \;

Answer 5

This works perfectly as we want:

Unzip files:

find . -name "*.zip" | xargs -P 5 -I FILENAME sh -c 'unzip -o -d "$(dirname "FILENAME")" "FILENAME"'

Above command does not create duplicate directories.

Remove all zip files:

find . -depth -name '*.zip' -exec rm {} \;

Answer 6

A solution that correctly handles all file names (including newlines) and extracts into a directory that is at the same location as the file, just with the extension removed:

find . -iname '*.zip' -exec sh -c 'unzip -o -d "${0%.*}" "$0"' '{}' ';'

Note that you can easily make it handle more file types (such as .jar) by adding them using -o, e.g.:

find . '(' -iname '*.zip' -o -iname '*.jar' ')' -exec ...