How to unzip a file using the command line?

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Which commands can be used via the command line to unzip a file?
Preferably something built into Windows or open source/free tools.

9 Answers

If you already have Java Development Kit on your PC and the bin directory is in your path (in most cases), you can use the command line:

jar xf test.zip

or if not in your path:

C:\Java\jdk1.6.0_03\bin>jar xf test.zip

Complete set of options for the jar tool available here.

Examples:

Extract jar file
    jar x[v]f jarfile [inputfiles] [-Joption] 
    jar x[v] [inputfiles] [-Joption]

7-Zip, it's open source, free and supports a wide range of formats.

7z.exe x myarchive.zip

Originally ZIP files were created with MS-DOS command line software from PKWare, the two programs were PKZIP.EXE and PKUNZIP.EXE. I think you can still download PKUNZIP at the PKWare site here:

http://www.pkware.com/software-pkzip/dos-compression

The actual command line could look something like this:

C:\>pkunzip c:\myzipfile.zip c:\extracttothisfolder\

Grab an executable from info-zip.

Info-ZIP supports hardware from microcomputers all the way up to Cray supercomputers, running on almost all versions of Unix, VMS, OS/2, Windows 9x/NT/etc. (a.k.a. Win32), Windows 3.x, Windows CE, MS-DOS, AmigaDOS, Atari TOS, Acorn RISC OS, BeOS, Mac OS, SMS/QDOS, MVS and OS/390 OE, VM/CMS, FlexOS, Tandem NSK and Human68K (Japanese). There is also some (old) support for LynxOS, TOPS-20, AOS/VS and Novell NLMs. Shared libraries (DLLs) are available for Unix, OS/2, Win32 and Win16, and graphical interfaces are available for Win32, Win16, WinCE and Mac OS.

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