unzip Command: Tutorial & Examples

Decompress files

The unzip command is used to extract files from a ZIP archive. The basic syntax for the command is:

unzip archive.zip

This will extract the files in the archive.zip file into the current directory. You can also specify a different directory to extract the files to using the -d option:

unzip archive.zip -d /path/to/directory

You can also list the contents of a ZIP file without extracting it using the -l option:

unzip -l archive.zip

Other options include the -q option for quiet mode and the -o option to overwrite existing files without prompting.

unzip -oq archive.zip -d /path/to/directory

It is also worth mentioning that in some distribution of Linux you may need to use apt install unzip to install unzip package if not already installed.