Recursively unzip files and then delete original file, leaving unzipped files in place from shell

Question

I've so far figured out how to use find to recursively unzip all the files:

find . -depth -name `*.zip` -exec /usr/bin/unzip -n {} \; 

But, I can't figure out how to remove the zip files one at a time after the extraction. Adding rm *.zip in an -a -exec ends up deleting most of the zip files in each directory before they are extracted. Piping through a script containing the rm command (with -i enabled for testing) causes find to not find any *.zips (or at least that's what it complains). There is, of course, whitespace in many of the filenames but at this point syntaxing in a sed command to add _'s is a bit beyond me. Thank for your help!

Answer 1

As mentioned above, this should work.

find . -depth -name '*.zip' -execdir unzip -n {} \; -delete

However, note two things:

• The -n option instructs unzip to not overwrite existing files. You may not know if the zip files differ from the similarly named target files. Even so, the -delete will remove the zip file.
• If unzip can't unzip the file--say because of an error--it might still delete it. The command will certainly remove it if -exec rm {} \; is used in place of -delete.

A safer solution might be to move the files following the unzip to a separate directory that you can trash when you're sure you have extracted all the files successfully.