unzip not extracting: caution: not extracting; -d ignored

Question

I have a ZIP archive, foo.zip, with some files not contained within a directory. I want to extract them to the local foo directory. I'm trying to extract them with this command:

unzip -v foo.zip -d ./foo

However, the output says it is not extracting:

caution:  not extracting; -d ignored
Archive:  foo.zip
 Length   Method    Size  Cmpr    Date    Time   CRC-32   Name
--------  ------  ------- ---- ---------- ----- --------  ----
    2345  Defl:N     1234  47% 2018-07-16 00:00 0123456f  bar
    ...   ...         ...  ... ...        ...   ...       ...
--------          -------  ---                            -------
   34567            23456  32%                            n files

Why is it ignoring the -d argument and not extracting?

Answer 1

It’s not extracting because you used the -v option, which instructs unzip to only show you the catalog of the archive, without extracting it.

Since the -d option only makes sense when extracting, it warns you that it’s ignoring it, but it errs on the side of caution and doesn’t extract.