Are there other options to unzip a file in Ubuntu besides "unzip"?

Question

My sysadmin is unreachable right now, and I have a zipped file on the server that I would like to unzip...however, we don't currently have zip and unzip installed, and I don't have root access to install them...

Am I out of options entirely? Are there other things that can unzip this file?

just tried tar -x file.zip and it seems to be doing something... — johnnietheblack, Aug 10 '13 at 20:21
@spuder you should leave an answer in case this works, and i'll upvote ya — johnnietheblack, Aug 10 '13 at 20:22

jlliagre · Answer 1 · 2021-12-26T23:20:09.623

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If you have java installed, the jar command can unzip a zipped file:

jar xvf file.zip

Note that you can install java without root access: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/webnotes/install/linux/linux-jdk.html

Update: OpenJDK is downloadable for Linux as a tar.gz archive installable without root access here: http://jdk.java.net/17/

The Windows version is however a zip file so that wouldn't help on that OS...

edited Dec 26 '21 at 23:20

answered Aug 10 '13 at 20:08

jlliagre

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Today I Learned. – Tom O'Connor Aug 10 '13 at 20:08
The program 'jar' can be found in the following packages: * default-jdk * fastjar * gcj-4.6-jdk * openjdk-6-jdk * gcj-4.5-jdk * openjdk-7-jdk Ask your administrator to install one of them :( – johnnietheblack Aug 10 '13 at 20:20
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See my answer update. – jlliagre Aug 10 '13 at 20:24
I am a little scerred to install anything on the server, for fear of the wrath of my sysadmin, but i will definitely try this if need be. – johnnietheblack Aug 10 '13 at 20:38

score 12 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:41

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I haven't tried this, but, there's a zipfile module in Python's standard library since version 1.6, and since version 2.6 has had an extractall method

You should be able to do something like:

Create a file with the following contents (editing it to fit your use case).
Save the file as "unzipfile.py"
Run with python unzipfile.py

And it'll extract test.zip to /home/user/directory.

import zipfile

with zipfile.ZipFile('test.zip', "r") as z:
  z.extractall("/home/user/directory")

Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9432315/167299

Alternatively, BusyBox contains an unzip "module", and if you could download and run the statically-linked BusyBox, then you could use that to unzip things.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:41

Community

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answered Aug 10 '13 at 19:51

Tom O'Connor

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i tried the first part of this and got: The program 'import' can be found in the following packages: * imagemagick * graphicsmagick-imagemagick-compat - btw...i didn't downvote you – johnnietheblack Aug 10 '13 at 20:19
Oh. You know you need to run it through Python? – Tom O'Connor Aug 10 '13 at 20:27
Like, Type python, then run python, and type that into the interpreter. – Tom O'Connor Aug 10 '13 at 20:27
ha no...i didn't know that....ill try that as well. (gives an idea of how new this is to me) – johnnietheblack Aug 10 '13 at 20:31
trying this now... i can't tell if its working or not....no errors, but simply outputs: '...' - is that standard for python? – johnnietheblack Aug 10 '13 at 20:50
Press enter a couple of times. – Tom O'Connor Aug 10 '13 at 20:52
You should ditch trying to do this in interactive mode, copy the lines into a file, and run that with python. – Tom O'Connor Aug 10 '13 at 21:00
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WOW. looks like it worked....I stumbled thru successfully in interactive mode! – johnnietheblack Aug 10 '13 at 21:07
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Welcome to Python. It's awesome. – Tom O'Connor Aug 10 '13 at 21:14
I tried this and it seemed like some file permissions got set incorrectly. – Neal Fultz Mar 10 '17 at 22:25
Neal: zip doesn't store file permissions. Tar does, on the other hand. – Tom O'Connor Mar 10 '17 at 22:29
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You can now just call the module directly from the command line `python -m zipfile -e monty.zip target-dir/` (see https://docs.python.org/2/library/zipfile.html#command-line-interface) – Peter Gibson Apr 18 '17 at 07:26
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awesome, only thing that worked for me! – Santiago Apr 08 '21 at 13:58

score 3 · Answer 3 · edited Aug 10 '13 at 21:51

I don't believe there are other ways of unzipping the file on a system without unzip, but you could send the file to another linux system (with unzip installed or root access available), unzip the file there and - if necessary - send the unzipped file back to the original server.

The command to send a file from one server to another is scp. The syntax to send the file is:

scp <filename> <username>@<otherhostname>:<portnumber><fullpathtolocation>
e.g.: scp file.zip  user@server.example.com:2222/home/user/

Hope this helps!

spuder · Answer 4 · 2013-08-10T21:36:10.933

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BSD / Mac OSX

The tar utility that ships with Mac and BSD derivatives, support extracting zip archives from the tar command

tar -xvf foo.zip

tar --version
bsdtar 2.8.3 - libarchive 2.8.3

Debian / RHEL

The tar archive that ships with Ubuntu and others does not support extracting zip files. The best option will be to scp the file to a machine with zip installed.

tar -xvf foo.zip
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

Smoke Test

echo "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" > bar.txt
zip -r bar.zip bar.txt
rm bar.txt
tar -xvf bar.txt
cat bar.txt
the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

Update

Rewrote answer to clarify that tar -xvf only works on bsd OS's. While it is good information, It will not work in this scenario after all.

edited Aug 10 '13 at 21:36

answered Aug 10 '13 at 20:25

spuder

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what does the -zxvf do? – johnnietheblack Aug 10 '13 at 20:27
when i try that, i get tar: This does not look like a tar archive tar: Skipping to next header ... does that mean it failed, or still going? – johnnietheblack Aug 10 '13 at 20:29
`tar` ability to process zip files would be an extension Ubuntu tar (i.e. GNU tar) doesn't seem to provide. `-z` is for gzipped files, not zipped ones (unless it is a very recent extension). – jlliagre Aug 10 '13 at 20:29
does that mean if i upload a gzip it would work? – johnnietheblack Aug 10 '13 at 20:30
It will, but that's not your question ;-) – jlliagre Aug 10 '13 at 20:31
v = verbose so you can see what it is doing, In this case, z does nothing, I always hit it out of habit, f specifies which archive to use (not really needed) – spuder Aug 10 '13 at 20:32
@spuder, what `tar` version are you using and are you sure it understands zipped files ? – jlliagre Aug 10 '13 at 20:34
The z option is harmless on OSx if it isn't needed. Looks like on your system, you must omit the z or else you get the error "does not look like a tar archive" – spuder Aug 10 '13 at 20:35
tar -xvf tokens.sql.zip came up with: tar: This does not look like a tar archive tar: Skipping to next header tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors – johnnietheblack Aug 10 '13 at 20:37
This answer doesn't apply to Ubuntu. It seems only OS/X tar (and perhaps *BSD's one) handles zip archives, none of the other Unix and Linux do. – jlliagre Aug 10 '13 at 20:42
tar (GNU tar) 1.26 – johnnietheblack Aug 10 '13 at 20:43

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 10 '13 at 19:53

0

Copy the file to another machine, unzip, and copy back.

answered Aug 10 '13 at 19:53

dmourati

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score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Aug 10 '13 at 20:55

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If the server has Gnome running, use the archive utility

enter image description here

http://www.wikihow.com/Unzip-Files-in-Linux

answered Aug 10 '13 at 20:55

spuder

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Are there other options to unzip a file in Ubuntu besides "unzip"?

6 Answers6