How to Create and Extract Zip Files to Specific Directory in Linux

In one of our several articles about the tar command, we showed you how to extract tar files to a specific or different directory in Linux. This short guide explains to you how to extract/unzip .zip archive files to a specific or different directory in Linux.

Zip is a simple, cross-platform file packaging and compression utility for Unix-like systems including Linux and Windows OS; plus many other operating systems. The “zip” format is a common archiving file format used on Windows PC’s and most importantly, it enables you to specify the compression level between 1 and 9 as an option.

Create Zip Archive File in Linux

To create a .zip (packaged and compressed) file from the command line, you can run a similar command like the one below, The -r flag enables recursive reading of files directory structure.

$ zip -r tecmint_files.zip tecmint_files

To unzip the tecmint_files.zip archive file you have just created above, you can run the unzip command as follows.

$ unzip tecmint_files.zip

The above command will extract the files into the current working directory. What if you want to send the unzipped files into a specific or different directory – you can learn this in the next section.

Extract Zip File to Specific or Different Directory

To extract/unzip .zip archive files to specific or different directory from the command line, include the -d unzip command flag as shown below. We will use the same example above to demonstrate this.

This will extract the .zip file content into the /tmp directory:

$ mkdir -p /tmp/unziped
$ unzip tecmint_files.zip -d /tmp/unziped
$ ls -l /tmp/unziped/

For more usage information, read zip and unzip command man pages.

$ man zip
$ man unzip

You may also like to read the following related articles.

In this short article, we have explained how to extract/unzip .zip archive files to a specific or different directory in Linux. You can add your thoughts to this article via the feedback form below.