How to Clean Up after a Tarball or Zipball Explodes

Don't you hate it when someone sends you a big fat tar or zip file full of lots of files, and didn't bother to put everything in one folder? If you extract it unawares, you get dozens--maybe hundreds--of files littering your working directory.

However, the bash shell makes it easy enough to delete everything. For a tar file, this command deletes everything that was extracted from the tarball:

$ rm `tar tfz sometarball.tgz`

Zip files are tougher, since Zip utilities usually don't have a command line interface. But if you have Java installed, you can do the same thing. Java has a jar command that's very similar to tar, but works on Zip archives. (It has a few extensions, but those are irrelevant here.) So here's how you clean up after an exploding zip file:

$ rm `jar tf somezipball.zip`

Syntactically, these two commands are identical. They both list all the files in the archive, then pass the result to the rm (Unix/Linux delete) command. The z option in the tar command tells tar that it's dealing with a compressed file. If the file isn't compressed (normally the case if the file extension is just .tar), omit it. The z option isn't needed with the jar commands; zip files are always compressed.