How can I force unzip / zip not to create a subdirectory when I extract it?

Question

Depending on how a zip file is created, sometimes it will extract all of the files directly, and sometimes it will extract the files into a subdirectory.

If the latter is true, how can I force the unzip command to "ignore" that first level directory?

Example:

cd /tmp
wget http://omeka.org/files/omeka-1.5.1.zip
mkdir omeka
unzip omeka-1.5.1.zip -d omeka/
cd omeka/
ll

What I'm getting is /tmp/omeka/omeka-1.5.1/:

total 12
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2012-05-08 18:44 ./
drwxrwxrwt 6 root root 4096 2012-05-08 18:44 ../
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 2012-04-20 14:54 omeka-1.5.1/

What I want is of the files extracted to /tmp/omeka/, (one level up and no version number included in the directory structure)

/tmp/omeka/(files)

I know I can use the -j option to "junk paths" but I want to keep the subdirectory structure, just not the top level directory structure. How can I do this?

Answer 1

If your zip file contains no directory structure or you do not need to preserve it, you can use this:

cd /tmp
wget http://omeka.org/files/omeka-1.5.1.zip
unzip -j omeka-1.5.1.zip -d omeka
cd omeka
ll

Answer 2

Use a FUSE filesystem that allows you to browse archives like directories, such as AVFS. Use cp to extract the files to the directory of your choice.

mountavfs
cp -Rp ~/.avfs/tmp/omeka-1.5.1.zip\#/omeka-1.5.1 omeka

Since we're assuming that there is a single toplevel directory in the archive, you can shorten this to

cp -Rp ~/.avfs/tmp/omeka-1.5.1.zip\#/* omeka

Answer 3

This script is not robust, but works in the simple cases:

...
dest=omeka
unzip omeka-1.5.1.zip -d $dest/

if [ `ls $dest | wc -l` == 1 ]; then
  subdir=`ls $dest`
  mv $dest/$subdir/* $dest/
  rmdir $dest/$subdir
fi

It just checks to see if there is exactly one subdirectory, and if so, moves everything up out of it then deletes it.

Answer 4

Solution: unzip through a temporary symlink

In my case I wanted to overwrite a directory full of existing files with the content of a zip, without extracting the full zip first.

This solution is simple, does not require FUSE, only requires possibility of creating a symlink to the target directory.

How to do it

Assuming you know the extra directory, in you case omeka-1.5.1, you can do this:

    mkdir omeka
    ln -s . omeka/omeka-1.5.1 # create a symlink that redirects output
    unzip omeka-1.5.1.zip -d omeka/
    rm omeka/omeka-1.5.1 # remove symlink
    rmdir omeka

unzip will try to unzip to omeka-1.5.1 which is actually a symlink to containing dir. As a result, files will land in omeka directly.

Possible variants

You can imagine variants to redirect one or more parts of a depeer hierarchy.

    ln -s ../myfoo omeka/omeka-1.5.1/foo
    ln -s ../../mybarxyzzy omeka/omeka-1.5.1/subdir/bar

You can also use this trick if the target filesystem does not allow symlinks:

    cd /tmp # or any dir where you can create a symlink
    mkdir omeka
    ln -s /path/to/target/even/if/no/symlink/possible omeka/omeka-1.5.1
    unzip /path/to/omeka-1.5.1.zip -d omeka/
    rm omeka/omeka-1.5.1 # remove symlink
    rmdir omeka

Conclusion

This solution is kind of a hack but works very well.

Idea for improvement of unzip

It would be desirable to have an option to unzip, like patch --strip=number (or -pnumber) that chops number path components at beginning (ref. Comparing and Merging Files: patch Directories).

Answer 5

I've just registered today, so I can't upvote @SteveBennet answer and can't add a comment there.

Based on his answer I created a recursive function like this:

...

shopt -s dotglob # To include hidden files in the move command

function moveSub {
  local dest=$1
  if [ `ls $dest | wc -l` == 1 ]; then
    local subdir=`ls $dest`
    moveSub "$dest/$subdir"
    mv $dest/$subdir/* $dest/
    rmdir $dest/$subdir
  fi
}

moveSub "$dest"

Just like @SteveBennet said: this script is not robust, but works in the simple cases.

Hope it's useful.

Answer 6

Most likely you want to run unzip with the -j option, as in:

unzip -j files.zip -d ./output/

But you might be surprised by its behavior:

-j junk paths. The archive's directory structure is not recreated; all files are deposited in the extraction directory (by default, the current one).

If you extract files.zip in output directory ./output and you get this as a result:

./output/files/subfolder1/f1
./output/files/subfolder1/f2

then the -j option will give you this (all paths striped):

./output/f1
./output/f2

Answer 7

Oneliner (for Mac / BSD only)

tar zxvf omeka-1.5.1.zip --strip-components 1 -C omeka/

Note 1: The specified destination folder omeka/ does NOT need to exist beforehand.

Note 2: This only works on Mac / BSD flavor of tar. Unzipping a .zip file with tar will not work on Ubuntu (Linux) or any other unix OS that is not based on BSD.

This can be done on Mac/BSD because bsdtar supports zip file extraction. Note: there are some limitations of the zip file format support that are outside the scope of this answer. Suffice it to say that if you're not trying to stream or pipe the file and the file is not huge, all should be fine.

The following comment by @thorsummoner on a comment on another question provides a little more context:

it almost certainly works by buffering the entire zip file into memory before doing any operations with it. This makes it possible to pretend small zip files are streamable (such as from a trusted http server) but its only skin-deep. zip's aren't and can't be streamable so bsdtar won't solve the problem of mixing big data with zip, nor will it really assist with any problems of working with zip other than maybe licensing as bsdtar (libarchive-tools) is released under the BSD-3-clause-UCB license instead of the infozip license.