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Eduard Florinescu
Asked: 2012-10-06 01:19:10 +0800 CST

How to list content of all .zip files in a folder and grep for a specific file?

  • 772

I have 348 zip files and I want to find a file that is in one of the zip files, unzip -l doesn't work with wild cards?

How can I list content of all .zip files and grep through the merged list of all files contained in the zips?

grep

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Using zipinfo is a fine solution here. However, in general whenever you want to apply a command to a list of files and the command doesn’t accept a list of files, you can use a for loop:

    for file in *.zip; do
    unzip -l "$file"
done \
| grep "\.zip\|setup"

    If the file you are searching for has spaces in it like: your file, in the grep regular expression you need to escape every space with a backslash like grep "\.zip\|your\ file".

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  2. You can use zipinfo. It is included in the default Ubuntu installation. Check the manual page for more info.

    For example, to look for a pattern setup in a bunch of zip files in current directory, use this command:

    find ./ -iname *zip 2> /dev/null -print0 | xargs -0 zipinfo | grep setup
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  3. To list the files in a zip archive you can use the following command.

    unzip -l

    To grep a compressed archive you should use the compressed archive utilities built to work with that type of archive format.

    For zip archives: 

    zipgrep --help  
usage: zipgrep [egrep_options] pattern zipfile [members...]
Uses unzip and egrep to search the zip members for a string or pattern.

    For tar archives: 

    zgrep --help
Usage: /bin/zgrep [OPTION]... [-e] PATTERN [FILE]...
Look for instances of PATTERN in the input FILEs, using their
uncompressed contents if they are compressed.

OPTIONs are the same as for 'grep'.

    There are a few other tools that work with archives as well. You can pipe the out put into grep to do the same thing. 

    zcat
zcat my.archive.zip | grep "some text"

    Or you can use the search functionality of these tools

    zless
zmore
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