Unzip or Unrar Many Files at Once in Linux
If you’ve got a directory with dozens of zipped or rar’d files, you can run a single command to unzip them all in one step, thanks to the power of the bash shell.
For this task, we’ll use bash’s for loop command structure. Replace <var> with a variable name, and <list> with either a command that outputs a list or an explicit list.
for <var> in <list>
do
command $<var>;
done
You can run it on a single line with this syntax instead:
for <var> in <list>;do command $<var>;done
So if you want to unrar a list of files, you could use this command. You don’t necessarily need the quotes, but it helps when the filenames have spaces or something like that in them.
for f in *.rar;do unrar e “$f”;done
If you wanted to use 7zip to extract a list of files:
for f in *.001;do 7z e “$f”;done
Or if you wanted to unzip a list of files:
for f in *.zip;do unzip “$f”;done
You could even chain commands together if you wanted to. For instance, if all your zip files contained .txt files and you wanted to unzip them and then move the unzipped files to another directory:
for f in *.zip;do unzip “$f”;done; for f in *.txt;do mv “$f” /myfolder/;done
The bash shell is just so incredibly powerful… this doesn’t even tap the power, but it should give you a good idea of what is possible.
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Actually, I’m pretty sure with both these commands you can just do this:
unzip *.zip
unzip *.rar
Seems a bit more straightforward.
That may work sometimes, but didn’t work for me. (just tried it again to make sure)
The article is mostly illustrating how to use the for / do in bash =)
How would I go about ‘rarring’
or zipping a bunch of folders?
Is there a decompressor that extracts almost all file types, if so which?
find -name *.zip -exec unzip {} \;
Try unzip \*.zip – It works in RED HAT flavours, I have not tried it on any other linux.
Why didn’t i find this 3 days ago? The only matter is that the files aren’t extracted in subdirectories. I made a similar script myself. Take a look: http://ubuntu.alperortac.de/20.....ubfolders/
Maybe Alp wants something like this:
for f in *.zip;do unzip “$f” -d “$f.inflated”;done
It works on my Debian.
PS: I’ve not seen Alp link cause it seems broken.
Sorry for the broken link, and thanks for pointing that out. It’s fixed now.
Very useful tutorial! Thanks!
I modified mine a bit to account for archives which ask for confirmation. If you ‘man unzip’ you’ll find a -o switch which: “-o overwrite files WITHOUT prompting”
So my .sh script amounted to:
for f in *.zip;
do unzip -o -d “$f”;
done
Hope this helps someone! Regards,
Ax3
Looks like my previous code post didn’t go thru completely. I meant on the second line of code:
do unzip -o -d foldername/ “$f”;
Ax3
I know this page is old, but I just found it when looking for a good unrar script, so thought I would post my final solution. The situation: you’re in a directory with a bunch of folders, each one containing a compressed file. I used to use this script, which found and extracted all the *.rar files:
find -type f -name ‘*.rar’ -exec unrar x {} \;
But then i noticed some of my compressed files were distributed over many ‘part’ files, and occasionally, all of these would be *.rar files, and so this script would try to do the whole decompression for part file, which was annoying, time consuming and more importantly not the elegant solution! So after a bit of reading, I came up with this:
for directory in `ls -d */`; do
rarFile=`ls $directory | grep -i .rar –max-count 1`;
unrar e $directory$rarFile;
done
This iterates through each directory at the current level, and for each one finds just the first *.rar file, and extracts it to the current directory.
thx a lot!!!