This enables you to unzip sub-directories in folders in a ZIP archive without having to make recursive calls with the zip (unzip) command. To unzip a zip file, the following code will do it: ./unzip -r archivefile.zip /comedic This will unzip the current directory into the folder called /comedic. When the zip archive is done, you will see the name of the folder you extracted into /comedic. The following will use the -r option to unzip into the current working directory (in this case ~/comedic): unzip -r archivefile.zip /comedic/ /comedic/ ~/Documents ~/Documents This will unzip one directory at a time to the current home directory /comedic. This directory will hold the sub-directories in the archive file you want to unzip into /comedic along with the files themselves. The current directory will now be the home directory. /comedic/Documents You can use the /comedic/ to unzip directories into the current directory (i.e., sub-directories or the folder itself). The ~/comedic folder and all files under it will be accessible via the ~/Documents sub-directory on your Linux system. The following will unzip into the current working directory: ./unzip -r archivefile.zip / / ~/Documents/ This directory will contain the contents of archivefile.zip which will be unzipped into the ~/Documents/ directory. The ~/Documents directory will hold files and sub-directories which are also included in the unzipped archive. The filename of the directory will be the name of the directory containing the files you just unzipped. In this example, the folder /comedic/Documents will contain information about your home directory /comedic. This folder will make use of files contained in archivefile.zip in which folder names contain the information about your home directory /comedic. This folder is useful if you want to know what your home directory is and how to access it in general.