uncompress my love, cause maybe i dont love you all that much

February 9, 2008 11:26 AM

compressed files inside of compressed files inside of compressed files. arg. please help me automate this process.

i have one large RAR file, with many ZIP files in subdirectories in this file. inside the ZIP files, there are further subdirectories leading to... a RAR file. this end RAR file contains the final jpegs i need. can anyone please make the process of unpacking these end RARs (literally hundreds of hem) into some sort of managable directory structure? [oh and i'm on Vista]

posted by yonation to computers & internet (7 comments total)

If I had to do this, I'd do it via cygwin and the unrar and unzip command line tools. "unrar a.rar". "find a -name \*.zip -exec unzip {} \;". and repeat.
posted by Nelson at 11:49 AM on February 9

winrar has a command line and can uncompress recursively via the gui iirc.
posted by iamabot at 11:59 AM on February 9

You need to enable the WinRAR context menus evidently by running WinRAR once as an administrator and re-enabling them (Options -> Settings -> Integration -> Shell Integration).

Then, just select all archives, right click, and select "Extract Here" or "Extract each to seperate folder" depending on your preference. Repeat this again and then delete all the archives. If you extracted it to different folders, use a file search for *.zip or *.rar to get just the new archives and extract.
posted by easyasy3k at 12:06 PM on February 9

The freeware package 7-Zip understands both formats.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 1:02 PM on February 9

You might try the mighty Unzipthemall which is a lovely little free app.
posted by merocet at 2:43 PM on February 9

Stuffit has the option to "Continue to expand when expansion result is a single archive", which might skip some but not all steps.

It's designed for .tar.gz files and similar (I think there's a Mac equivalent that involves binhex).
posted by krisjohn at 6:16 PM on February 9

WinRAR will do this for you. You can load up the WinRAR program (not using the shell extensions), highlight any number of folders, and you can right-click and "Extract files to the specified folder". I just experimented with nested folders up to three deep - presumably it will find them at any depth.

If you want to extract everything into one folder with no subfolders, the option is in the Advanced tab when the extract menu pops up.
posted by neckro23 at 7:25 PM on February 9