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Zip & Unzip

Last modified: 2023-09-13

Zip is a command-line tool used for creating and manipulating compressed archive files in Unix, Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems.

Compress

zip <output> <target1> <target2> ...

zip example.zip example1.txt example2.txt
# -r: recursive (zip folder)
zip -r example.zip ./example

We can store symbolic links in a zip file.

ln -s /etc/passwd test.txt
zip --symlink test.zip test.txt

Decompress

unzip example.zip
# Specify the directory to decompress
unzip example.zip -d ./example

List Files without Decompressings

To list files in a zip file without extracting, use -l flag.

unzip -l example.zip

Unzip with Python

Also we can decompress an archived file using Python script.

import zipfile

filename = "./sample.zip"
extdir = "./"
password = "password123"

with zipfile.ZipFile(filename, 'r') as zp:
    try:
        zp.extractall(path=extdir, pwd=password.encode('utf-8'))
    except RuntimeError as e:
        print(e)