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
