Perl

Extract ZIP Files Without Preserving Directory Paths Using DiscardPaths

See more Zip Examples

This example demonstrates how to use the DiscardPaths property to extract files from a ZIP archive without recreating the stored directory structure.

When DiscardPaths is set to _TRUE_, all extracted files are written directly into the target extraction directory, and any stored ZIP path information is ignored.

This is useful when:

• Flattening ZIP contents into a single directory
• Ignoring stored subdirectory structures during extraction
• Extracting only the files themselves without recreating folders

Suppose the ZIP archive contains:

docs/readme.txt
docs/manual.pdf
images/logo.png

Normally, extracting the ZIP would create:

output/docs/readme.txt
output/docs/manual.pdf
output/images/logo.png

But when DiscardPaths is set to _TRUE_, the extracted files become:

output/readme.txt
output/manual.pdf
output/logo.png

The stored ZIP directory paths are discarded during extraction.

Chilkat2 Perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Chilkat2;

my $zip = Chilkat2::Zip->new;

# Open an existing ZIP archive.
my $success = $zip->OpenZip('example.zip');
if (!$success) {
    print $zip->LastErrorText, "\n";
    exit;
}

# Discard stored ZIP paths during extraction.
#
# When DiscardPaths = 1, all files are extracted
# directly into the target directory without recreating
# the ZIP directory structure.
$zip->DiscardPaths(1);

# Extract all files to the output directory.
#
# Even if the ZIP contains:
#
#     docs/readme.txt
#     docs/manual.pdf
#     images/logo.png
#
# The extracted files become:
#
#     c:/output/readme.txt
#     c:/output/manual.pdf
#     c:/output/logo.png
#
my $numFilesUnzipped = $zip->Unzip('c:/output');

if ($numFilesUnzipped < 0) {
    print $zip->LastErrorText, "\n";
    exit;
}

print 'Number of files extracted = ', $numFilesUnzipped, "\n";

$zip->CloseZip();

print "Files extracted successfully.\n";