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Asked: 2026-05-11T19:36:36+00:00

Zip-Archive mode works on systems with zip/unzip. How do you get it to work

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Zip-Archive mode works on systems with zip/unzip. How do you get it to work on Wnidows?

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  1. Editorial Team

    EMACS uses an external program to do the compression/uncompression. All it needs is to know the right program to use.

    Some extended discussion:

    As I say, i’ve got no Windows box, but the LISP code is in arc-mode.el at about line 230:

    (defcustom archive-zip-extract
  (if (and (not (executable-find "unzip"))
           (executable-find "pkunzip"))
      '("pkunzip" "-e" "-o-")
    '("unzip" "-qq" "-c"))
  "*Program and its options to run in order to extract a zip file member.
Extraction should happen to standard output.  Archive and member name will
be added."
  :type '(list (string :tag "Program")
        (repeat :tag "Options"
            :inline t
            (string :format "%v")))
  :group 'archive-zip)

    Observe the function executable-find. It searches in your EMACS exec-path, which includes some EMACS executable directories that aren’t in your normal PATH variable. In my case, it’s:

    ("/usr/bin" 
 "/bin" 
 "/usr/sbin" 
 "/sbin" 
 "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/libexec" 
 "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin" 
 "~/bin" 
 "/usr/local/bin" 
 "/usr/X11R6/bin")

    which includes the two directories inside the EMACS package. Your Windows installation will include equivalent directories somewhere down in the guts of the EMACS setup. That’s where to look for the executables if they’re not in your regular path.

    You can download pkunzip from this site, install it, and add the path to the installation with (add-to-list 'exec-path "c:/path/to/pkunzip")

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