Called “BetterZip QuickLook Generator”, the plugin is easy to install and to use, and it works with the latest versions of OS X.

If you’d rather not dig around in the command line, you can use a free third party Quick Look plugin to view the contents of zips and nearly any other archive files without extracting them.

Viewing Contents of Any Archive Without Extraction via Quick Look zip files, so if you’re looking for an all-encompassing solution for viewing the contents of many archive formats go with the BetterZipQL utility we’ll cover next. Nonetheless, zipinfo is bundled in virtually every version of Mac OS X so if you’re primarily a Mac user you should never have issues using it, even if you’re stepping back in time with a very early OS X version.Īgain, unzip -l will only view the contents of. One advantage to unzip however is that it appears on more unix platforms than zipinfo, meaning you should find it to be compatible with almost any OS you run across, whereas zipinfo is often not as common to come across. Sample output of the command is shown below:įor most uses it’s probably best to use the zipinfo command, if not for it’s simplicity, than for it’s extended reporting of archive contents. The reported information is not as detailed as ‘zipinfo’ but it still includes meaningful details including individual file size, file modification date and time, total file count, and file names. Checking Zip Contents with unzipĪnother way to see the contents of zips is to use the familiar ‘unzip’ command with a simple -l flag. The zipinfo command will only work for zip archives, and it will not view the contents of password protected zips.

rw-r-r- 2.1 unx 132 bX defN 21-May-13 12:44 testingsomething.txtĥ files, 4486 bytes uncompressed, 991 bytes compressed: 77.9% Here’s an example of the command and some sample output, remember output always looks cleaner in the terminal than it does on a webpage: All of this information is revealed without uncompressing the zip. At it’s most basic usage, it requires no flags or anything fancy, just point it at a zip file and you’ll see a full list of the archives contents, the file size of each item within the archive, file count, total size of the zip, the read/write/execution permissions per file, file modification date and time, the compression level and efficacy of the compression, and of course, the file names.

The most informative for zips and perhaps the easiest to remember is the ‘zipinfo’ command. Viewing Zip Archive Contents with zip info

Unzip rar mac terminal