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

Solution 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"'

Solution 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;

Solution 3:

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 ...

Solution 4:

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

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