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ZIP archives produced on Mac OS X systems usually include a __MACOSX directory which is useless, annoying, and unwanted on pretty much every other OS.

For unpacking ZIP archives I use Info-ZIP, which I think is the default unzipper on most Linux distributions. What's the best way of having Info-ZIP's unzip always and automatically suppress the extraction of any __MACOSX directory which may be present?

According to the unzip man page, the -x option can be used to exclude directories from processing, and indeed adding -x __MACOSX/* to the end of my unzip command line does the trick. But I don't want to have to type this all the time. The man page also says that command-line options can be read from the UNZIP environment variable, but apparently this works only for those options which come before the archive name (whereas -x must come after it):

$ export UNZIP="-x __MACOSX/*"
$ unzip foo.zip
unzip:  cannot find or open __MACOSX, __MACOSX.zip or __MACOSX.ZIP.

Is there any better solution than wrapping unzip in a shell script which automatically adds -x __MACOSX/* to the end of the command line?

Community
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Psychonaut
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1 Answers1

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Use a shell function:

myunzip() {
    unzip "$@" -x '__MACOSX/*'
}

myunzip foo.zip
Barmar
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  • Excellent solution! Thank you! However, I modified mine: my function is called `unzip`, it calls `/usr/bin/unzip` and the first argument is `$@`. That way, my habit of calling `unzip` remains untouched and `$@` does proper escaping of arguments. I don't know what `"@$"` does. – Vedran Šego Aug 06 '19 at 17:22
  • It was a typo for `$@`. – Barmar Aug 06 '19 at 18:02