Install unzip with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• funzip
• unzip
• unzipsfx
• zipgrep
• zipinfo

Project history

The Info-ZIP project describes itself as an Internet-based workgroup formed in 1990 as a mailing list on the original SimTel site. Its purpose was to provide free, portable, high-quality Zip and UnZip utilities compatible with PKWARE's DOS PKZIP and PKUNZIP tools.

The UnZip page emphasizes portability and non-MS-DOS behavior as primary objectives. It documents UnZip as an extraction utility for .zip archives that can list, test, or extract files, with defaults that reflect Unix-style directory recreation rather than PKUNZIP's older flat extraction behavior.

UnZip 6.0, released in April 2009 according to the official pages, added ZIP64 support for large archives, bzip2 compression-method support, UTF-8 filename handling, Unix symlink and UID/GID restoration improvements, and security fixes around extracted-file attributes and invalid compressed data.

Adoption history

Info-ZIP reports support across a very wide range of systems, from Unix, VMS, OS/2, Windows, MS-DOS, AmigaDOS, Atari TOS, Acorn RISC OS, BeOS, classic Mac OS, MVS, VM/CMS, Tandem NSK, and others. That breadth explains why UnZip became a normal baseline package in operating-system and language-build environments.

The supplied package-manager facts list UnZip packages across Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora/dnf, Arch/pacman, Alpine/apk, Nix, MacPorts, Chocolatey, Scoop, and openSUSE/zypper. In package-manager culture, that makes unzip less a discovery than an assumed primitive: build scripts, release artifacts, installer recipes, and CI jobs frequently expect it to be present or trivially installable.

The Info-ZIP home page also records incorporation of Info-ZIP code into products and systems such as IBM OS/2 components, NetWare 6 installation, SAP Business One, WinZip, DynaZIP, and PGP, and notes that its compression engine spun off into zlib. Those examples document how Info-ZIP moved from a command-line utility set into infrastructure software.

How it is used

UnZip is used to inspect ZIP archive contents, test archive integrity, extract files while preserving directory trees, process self-extracting archives through companion tools, and support scripts that receive upstream source or binary releases as .zip files. The Homebrew formula exposes the familiar executable family including unzip, zipinfo, funzip, unzipsfx, and zipgrep.

For packagers, its boring reliability is the point. It is often part of bootstrap chains because many upstream projects publish source archives as ZIP files even when the surrounding system is Unix-like.

Why package nerds care

UnZip is significant because it sits below many package recipes rather than beside them. A package manager can install it as a normal formula, but package build logic also uses it as a primitive for unpacking upstream artifacts, testing archive contents, and coping with filename encoding, symlink, timestamp, and large-file edge cases.

Its long cross-platform history also makes it a compatibility reference. When modern archive tools disagree about ZIP behavior, Info-ZIP UnZip remains one of the names maintainers recognize from decades of scripts, ports trees, and distribution build farms.

Timeline

• 1990: Info-ZIP workgroup formed as an Internet mailing list.
• 2008: Zip 3.00 released, according to the Info-ZIP home page.
• 2009: UnZip 6.0 released with ZIP64, bzip2, UTF-8, and security-related changes.
• 2026: Supplied input lists UnZip across major Unix, Windows, and macOS package managers.

Related projects

• Info-ZIP treats UnZip as the extraction companion to Info-ZIP Zip. The broader family includes ZipInfo, fUnZip, UnZipSFX, WiZ, MacZip, and the related zlib compression library lineage described by the Info-ZIP home page.

Sources

• https://infozip.sourceforge.net/FAQ.html
• https://infozip.sourceforge.net/Info-ZIP.html
• https://infozip.sourceforge.net/UnZip.html
• source_facts.package-manager