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

unix recursion spaces unzip
chuckrector picture chuckrector · Sep 20, 2008 · Viewed 113k times · Source

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

If I have the following directory structure and archives:

/Mother/Loving.zip
/Scurvy/Sea Dogs.zip
/Scurvy/Cures/Limes.zip

And I want to unzip all of the archives into directories with the same name as each archive:

/Mother/Loving/1.txt
/Mother/Loving.zip
/Scurvy/Sea Dogs/2.txt
/Scurvy/Sea Dogs.zip
/Scurvy/Cures/Limes/3.txt
/Scurvy/Cures/Limes.zip

What command or commands would I issue?

It's important that this doesn't choke on filenames that have spaces in them.

Answer

Vivek Thomas picture Vivek Thomas · Feb 23, 2010

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"'

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