Unzipping multiple files from the command-line

Ran into an issue recently where I attempting to unzip a directory of files, but the “Extract” and “Extract to” options stopped showing up in the GNOME Files app. Before realizing that the issue was due to there being a non-ZIP archive in the directory that I had selected, I took to the command-line to get the job done.

Well, at quite. Not at first at least.

My first thought was to simply run:

$ unzip *.zip

Which did not do what I had expected:

$ unzip *.zip
Archive:  first.zip
caution: filename not matched:  second.zip
caution: filename not matched:  third.zip
caution: filename not matched:  etc.zip
# ...
caution: filename not matched:  last.zip

Interestingly enough, the man page for unzip very much made it seem like this should have worked. It supports the * wildcard character, as long as it’s part of the filename and not the path.

Thinking maybe it was some weird thing in zsh, I gave it a shot in bash and was faced with the same results.

Fortunately, there’s a nice little trick that will get things moving. Simply tossing single quotes around the filename (with the wildcard) will get things moving in the right direction:

$ unzip '*.zip'
Archive:  first.zip
  inflating: first.txt

Archive:  second.zip
  inflating: second.txt

Archive:  third.zip
  inflating: third.txt

Archive:  last.zip
  inflating: last.txt

# ...

Archive:  last.zip
  inflating: last.txt