Cheatsheet: Unzip

-l gives a short listing: size, date, and name for each entry. -v (verbose) adds the compression method and ratio per file, plus a totals line when given alone. -Z switches to zipinfo mode entirely, which shows Unix-style permission bits and the most detail. All three read only the archive's central directory, so they work without extracting anything.

unzip -o archive.zip overwrites every conflicting file without prompting. unzip -n archive.zip does the opposite: it skips any file that already exists and leaves it untouched. Without either flag, unzip stops and asks [y]es/[n]o/[A]ll/[N]one/[r]ename per conflicting file, which is fine interactively but hangs a script -- always pass -o or -n in automation.

Add -d with the target path: unzip archive.zip -d /path/to/destination. unzip creates the destination directory (and any needed subdirectories from the archive) if it doesn't already exist, so you don't need a separate mkdir first.

Both -t and -tt run the CRC-32 checksum test on every entry against the data actually stored in the archive, so either one reliably catches corruption. -tt just adds verbose per-file progress and version diagnostics as it goes; it doesn't test anything -t doesn't already test.

There's no dedicated -i flag -- interactive per-file prompting on overwrite conflicts is unzip's default behavior when you pass neither -o nor -n. For a password-protected archive, supply the password on the command line with -P: unzip -P secret archive.zip. Info-ZIP's own docs flag -P as insecure on multi-user systems since the password can show up in the process list or shell history; omit -P and let unzip prompt for the password interactively when that matters.