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Uncompress 'zip' Archives

Source: R/zip.R
unzip.Rd

unzip() always restores modification times of the extracted files and directories.

Usage

unzip(
  zipfile,
  files = NULL,
  overwrite = TRUE,
  junkpaths = FALSE,
  exdir = ".",
  encoding = NULL,
  password = NULL
)

Arguments

zipfile

Path to the zip file to uncompress, or a character vector of paths. When multiple paths are given and all other arguments are at their defaults, the files are unzipped concurrently in a thread pool. Set the zip_threads option or the ZIP_THREADS environment variable to control the number of threads used. By default zip uses two threads.

files

Character vector of files to extract from the archive. Files within directories can be specified, but they must use a forward slash as path separator, as this is what zip files use internally. If NULL, all files will be extracted.

overwrite

Whether to overwrite existing files. If FALSE and a file already exists, then an error is thrown.

junkpaths

Whether to ignore all directory paths when creating files. If TRUE, all files will be created in exdir.

exdir

Directory to uncompress the archive to. If it does not exist, it will be created.

encoding

Encoding to use for entry filenames. ZIP files signal UTF-8 filenames via a flag in each entry; those are always decoded as UTF-8 regardless of encoding. For entries without that flag, encoding is used; NULL (the default) falls back to IBM CP437, which is what the ZIP specification prescribes for legacy entries. The value is passed to iconv().

password

Password for decrypting encrypted entries. It can be a string, a raw vector, or a function that returns one of these. If NULL (the default), the zip_password option is used, or no password if that is also NULL. The password is silently ignored for entries that are not encrypted.

Value

A data frame with one row per extracted entry and columns, invisibly: filename (path within the archive), compressed_size, uncompressed_size, timestamp, permissions, crc32, offset, type (same as in zip_list()), and path (absolute path to the extracted file on disk).

Permissions

If the zip archive stores permissions and was created on Unix, the permissions will be restored.

See also

Other zip/unzip functions: zip_list()

Examples

## temporary directory, to avoid messing up the user's workspace.
dir.create(tmp <- tempfile())
dir.create(file.path(tmp, "mydir"))
cat("first file", file = file.path(tmp, "mydir", "file1"))
cat("second file", file = file.path(tmp, "mydir", "file2"))

zipfile <- tempfile(fileext = ".zip")
zip::zip(zipfile, "mydir", root = tmp)

## List contents
zip_list(zipfile)
#> # A data frame: 3 × 9
#>   filename    compressed_size uncompressed_size timestamp           permissions
#>   <chr>                 <dbl>             <dbl> <dttm>              <octmode>  
#> 1 mydir/                    0                 0 2026-06-11 07:58:30 755        
#> 2 mydir/file1              15                10 2026-06-11 07:58:30 644        
#> 3 mydir/file2              16                11 2026-06-11 07:58:30 644        
#> # ℹ 4 more variables: crc32 <hexmode>, offset <dbl>, type <chr>,
#> #   encryption <chr>

## Extract and inspect result
tmp2 <- tempfile()
result <- unzip(zipfile, exdir = tmp2)
result[, c("filename", "path")]
#> # A data frame: 3 × 2
#>   filename    path                                        
#>   <chr>       <chr>                                       
#> 1 mydir/      /tmp/RtmpbGoLDs/file1b6570320ff1/mydir/     
#> 2 mydir/file1 /tmp/RtmpbGoLDs/file1b6570320ff1/mydir/file1
#> 3 mydir/file2 /tmp/RtmpbGoLDs/file1b6570320ff1/mydir/file2