Unzip a file on a server using SSH
It can save a lot of time to upload a single file to your web server then extract it, rather than extracting to your own computer and uploading the contents.
Assuming you’ve managed to upload the file to your server (e.g. using FTP), and connect via SSH to a unix server (PuTTY is a good client), follow these steps to extract it.
- Navigate to the directory containing your file. Use the command
cd
(change directory), for example:cd MyDirectory
. You can use ls to view the files in each folder. - Use the
unzip
command to extract:unzip MyZipFile.zip
. Typeunzip
by itself to find out more about it, including various options for using it. - If you want to move the files you’ve just extracted, you can use the
mv
command. If the files have been extracted to a subfolder and you want them out, trymv MyZipFile/* .
(the dot indicates that you are moving them to the current folder). - Finally, you can delete the zip file if you don’t need it anymore by
rm MyZipFile.zip
.