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 you how to extract/unzip .zip archive files to 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.

Read Also: 5 Best Command Line Archive Tools for Linux

Create Zip Archive File in Linux

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

$ zip -r tecmint_files.zip tecmint_files 

Create Zip File in Linux

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 unziped files into a specific or different directory – you can learn this in 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/

Extract Zip Files to Specific Directory

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

$ man zip
$ man unzip 

You may also like to read following related articles.

1. How to Archive/Compress Files & Directories in Linux
2. How to Open, Extract and Create RAR Files in Linux
3. Peazip – A Portable File Manager and Archive Tool for Linux
4. Dtrx – An Intelligent Archive Extraction (tar, zip, cpio, rpm, deb, rar) Tool for Linux

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