zipcat

zipcat

zipcat is a command-line utility that lets you pipe the contents of one or more compressed files to stdout, letting you easily search the contents of zip archives and more. zipcat has full support for actual zip archives (not just gz/deflate-compressed content), and provides options to optionally filter the files included/excluded from the enumeration.

Installation

zipcat binaries are available via cargo, the rust package manager, as follows:

cargo install zipcat

Downloads for Windows are also available pre-compiled from NeoSmart Technologies at the zipcat homepage at https://neosmart.net/zipcat/

Usage

Usage: zipcat ZIPFILE [options]
Pipes content of compressed file(s) within a zip archive to stdout

Options:
    -h, --help          print this help menu
    -s, --silent        suppress file names from being sent to stderr
    -x, --exclude PATTERN
                        exclude file(s) matching pattern (can use more than
                        once)
    -i, --include PATTERN
                        include only file(s) matching pattern (can use more
                        than once)

By default, zipcat will pipe the contents of all files it encounters in the zip archive. Contents are written to stdout, prefixed with a single line containing the filename that is output to stderr (so it is always safe to perform operations on stdout). This behavior can be disabled via the --silent flag.

For pattern matching, zipcat supports filtering which files will be printed to stdout via the --include and --exclude command line arguments (which may be used repeatedly to add additional include/exclude patterns). Not providing any --include filters is synonymous with a default * include filter to include all files from the archive in the output. zipcat uses rust's glob library for pattern matching include/exclude filters. Filters should match the entire path within the archive (no leading . or / is required), rather than being a partial match. * will match any pattern in a filename, and ** can be used to glob across sudirectories.