unzip zip files that are contained in a zip file on windows

Question

I have a zip file results.zip. It contains two folders that contain a bunch of zip files -- PASS/test1.zip, FAIL/test2.zip, FAIL/test3.zip.

On linux it is trivial to unzip these in a couple of steps:

$ unzip results.zip
$ echo FAIL/*.zip PASS/*.zip | xargs -n1 unzip

Some windows users complain that it is cumbersome to unzip all the files on windows. (There are dozens of zips inside the main zip.) Is there a mechanism that would allow them to expand the contents of all of the files at once?

Some customer boxes are newer, but there are many that are still using WinXP.

Answer 1

Give them unzip.exe and a batch script like

unzip results.zip
for %%i in (FAIL\*.zip PASS\*.zip) do unzip %%i

Answer 2

Try ExtractNow. I haven't tested this feature myself, but it does claim to support it.

Answer 3

You could have them use 7-zip. It's free (Corporate use may not be, check with the web site) and has command line and graphical UI.

http://www.7-zip.org/

You could have them use 7-zip. It's free (Corporate use may not be, check with the web site) and has command line and graphical UI.

http://www.7-zip.org/

Sorry, I guess I didn't understand what you wanted.

You could either write a batch file to loop through it, or potentially leverage its SDK and write an app to do what you want using its libraries.

The following example batch file worked for me - it may not meet your needs though because I didn't mess around with subfolders.

@echo off

if "%1x" == "x" goto startup

7z.exe e %1

move %1 old

:startup

if not exist old md old

for %%f in (*.zip) do call %0 %%f

Answer 4

See this

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Compression-tools/Multi-Unpacker.shtml

"Nested archive handling (recursively extract archives that were packed in other archives)."

OS: Windows 2K / XP / 2003 / Vista