How to unzip a file with php

Question

I want to unzip a file and this works fine

system('unzip File.zip');

But I need to pass in the file name through the URL and can not get it to work, this is what I have.

$master = $_GET["master"];
system('unzip $master.zip'); 

What am I missing? I know it has to be something small and stupid I am overlooking.

Thank you,

Answer 1

Hello @kartik.

PHP has built-in extensions for dealing with compressed files. There should be no need to use system calls for this. ZipArchive is one option.

$zip = new ZipArchive;
$res = $zip->open('file.zip');
if ($res === TRUE) {
  $zip->extractTo('/myzips/extract_path/');
  $zip->close();
  echo 'woot!';
} else {
  echo 'doh!';
}

Also, as others have commented, $HTTP_GET_VARS has been deprecated since version 4.1 which was a really long time ago. Don't use it. Use the $_GET superglobal instead.

Finally, be very careful about accepting whatever input is passed to a script via a $_GET variable.

Hope it helps!!
Thank you!!

Comments

Have you tried this and got successful?

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Hello,

Yes, it is a working solution. You can also give a try to make things clear to you

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Thank you for the advise. I am new to this and just figuring everything out. With your code, how can I get it to unzip in the same folder the zipped file is in?

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There is a difference between the current working directory of your script and the directory where the zip file resides. If the zip file is in the same directory as the script you could do $zip->extractTo('./'); However, this is likely not the case. A better option is to determine the zip file's location in the filesystem and extract it there

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I used yourDestinationDir as session_save_path() . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . "$name" . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR where $name is target folder to unzip in session folder. can i used it?

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You should be careful when dealing with system or exec functions which contains variables ! It can litteraly give a free command line from your server to a hacker