Question
I have a RAR file and a ZIP file. Within these two there is a folder. Inside the folder there are several 7-zip (.7z) files. Inside every 7z there are multiple files with the same extension, but whose names vary.
RAR or ZIP file
|___folder
|_____Multiple 7z
|_____Multiple files with same extension and different name
I want to extract just the ones I need from thousands of files... I need those files whose names include a certain substring. For example, if the name of a compressed file includes '[!]' in the name or '(U)' or '(J)' that's the criteria to determine the file to be extracted.
I can extract the folder without problem so I have this structure:
folder
|_____Multiple 7z
|_____Multiple files with same extension and different name
I'm in a Windows environment but I have Cygwin installed. I wonder how can I extract the files I need painlessly? Maybe using a single command line line.
Additional information:
I'd like an answer with a general example (maybe in command line not necessailly to be done in Windows,it can be done with Linux/bash, etc) to extract the files given a substring criteria. Otherwise I'll have to open every single 7-zip file and select manually the files I need, and I have thousands of files to do this task.
The criteria I need is:
- Among the files included in a 7-zip file, the filename has to include '[!]' as priority.
- It can also have '(U)', '(E)' or '(J)'. a) If '[!]' is present, is accompained of any of these 3 letters in between parenthesis and a space before it.
- EXAMPLE: '(U) [!]'
- b) There can be files where '[!]' is not present and any of those 3 letters with parenthesis can be accompained of another optional code.
- EXAMPLES: '(J) [b1]', '(J) [b2]', '(J) [o1]' and '(J)'.
- In this example, the file without the secondary code is the one that needs to be extracted. That is: '(J)'. THANKS to anyone who helps me achieve this!
- If files don't meet the criteria, but there is only one file in the archive - extract it
- Archive names and file names inside can have spaces
Solution
This solution is based on bash, it was tested and works on Cygwin and on Ubuntu.
Since you have the conditional requirement to search for (X) [!].ext files first and if there are no such files then look for (X).ext files, I don't think it is possible to write some single expression to handle this logic.
The solution should have some if/else logic to test the list of files inside the archive and decide which files to extract.
Here is the initial structure inside the zip/rar archive (I made a script to prepare this structure):
folder
├── 7z_1.7z
│ ├── (E).txt
│ ├── (J) [!].txt
│ ├── (J).txt
│ ├── (U) [!].txt
│ └── (U).txt
├── 7z_2.7z
│ ├── (J) [b1].txt
│ ├── (J) [b2].txt
│ ├── (J) [o1].txt
│ └── (J).txt
├── 7z_3.7z
│ ├── (E) [!].txt
│ ├── (J).txt
│ └── (U).txt
└── 7z 4.7z
└── test.txt
The output is this:
output
├── 7z_1.7z # This is a folder, not an archive
│ ├── (J) [!].txt # Here we extracted only files with [!]
│ └── (U) [!].txt
├── 7z_2.7z
│ └── (J).txt # Here there are no [!] files, so we extracted (J)
├── 7z_3.7z
│ └── (E) [!].txt # We had here both [!] and (J), extracted only file with [!]
└── 7z 4.7z
└── test.txt # We had only one file here, extracted it
And this is the script to do the extraction.