See Inside A Zip Without Extracting

Space on a .zip shows Apple’s icon and size. spacebar lists what’s inside as a tree, with sizes and dates, and extracts nothing.

Install It

Download for Mac

Or paste this in Terminal

$ curl -fsSL https://spacebar.patebryant.com/install.sh | sh Copy

The script downloads the latest notarized release from GitHub, checks its SHA-256 and installs to ~/Applications, no sudo. Read the script.

Press Space On An Archive

1. .zip .dmgSelect an archive or a disk image in Finder.
2. SpaceFolders first; click a column to sort. A .dmg shows its format and encryption, unmounted.
3. OpenUnpacks it in its default app.

Read A File Inside

Click a file in a zip, tar or 7z, or press Return. Text, code, JSON, CSV, images and PDFs show in place, read-only, under archive.zip › folder/file.md; ← returns. A lone .gz of text shows the text.

Formats

• ZIPZip.zip
• TARTar.tar, .tgz, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tbz, .tar.xz, .txz
• 7ZMore.7z, .rar, .zst, .tzst

It lists the first 5,000 entries and says how many there are. If an unarchiver owns .rar, pick the archive from the folder’s sidebar.

Safe To Look At

macOS’s own bsdtar lists it in a sandbox that reads only that archive and system files: no writes, no network, five seconds at most. Nothing is extracted or run. A file opened inside stays in memory, never on disk.

Without An App

Terminal can list an archive too, without extracting it:

• unzip -l archive.zip lists a zip’s files, with sizes and dates.
• zipinfo archive.zip adds permissions and compression.
• tar -tvf archive.tar.gz lists a tar, compressed or not.

spacebar shows the same list as a tree when you press Space, and opens a file inside with a click.

More: Quick Look a whole folder, the Space helper, Quick Look replacement, compare.

Questions