Is it possible in unix to search inside zip files

I once needed something similar to find class files in a bunch of zip files. Here it is:

#!/bin/bash

function process() {
while read line; do
    if [[ "$line" =~ ^Archive:\s*(.*) ]] ; then
        ar="${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
        #echo "$ar"
    else
        if [[ "$line" =~ \s*([^ ]*abc\.jpg)$ ]] ; then
            echo "${ar}: ${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
        fi
    fi
done
}


find . -iname '*.zip' -exec unzip -l '{}' \; | process

Now you only need to add one line to extract the files and maybe move them. I'm not sure exactly what you want to do, so I'll leave that to you.

If your unix variant supports FUSE (Linux, *BSD, OSX, Solaris all do), mount AVFS to access archives transparently. The command mountavfs creates a view of the whole filesystem, rooted at ~/.avfs, in which archive files have an associated directory that contains the directories and files in the archive. For example, if you have foo.zip in the current directory, then the following command is roughly equivalent to unzip -l foo.zip:

mountavfs    # needs to be done once and for all
find ~/.avfs$PWD/foo.zip\# -ls

So, to loop over all images contained in a zip file under the current directory and copy them to /destination/directory (with a prompt in case of clash):

find ~/.avfs"$PWD" -name '*.zip' -exec sh -c '
    find "${0}#" -name "*.jpg" -exec cp -ip {} "$1" \;
' {} /destination/directory \;

In zsh:

cp -ip ~/.avfs$PWD/**/*.zip(e\''REPLY=($REPLY\#/**/*.jpg(N))'\') /destination/directory

Deconstruction: ~/.avfs$PWD/**/*.zip expands to the AVFS view of the zip files under the current directory. The glob qualifier e is used to modify the output of the glob: …/*.zip(e\''REPLY=$REPLY\#'\') would just append a # to each match. REPLY=($REPLY\#/**/*.jpg(N)) transforms each match into the array of .jpg files in the .zip# directory.