How to read MANIFEST.MF file from JAR using Bash

by 
$ unzip -q -c myarchive.jar META-INF/MANIFEST.MF
  • -q will suppress verbose output from the unzip program
  • -c will extract to stdout

Example:

$ unzip -q -c commons-lang-2.4.jar META-INF/MANIFEST.MF

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Ant-Version: Apache Ant 1.7.0
Created-By: 1.5.0_13-119 (Apple Inc.)
Package: org.apache.commons.lang
Extension-Name: commons-lang
Specification-Version: 2.4
Specification-Vendor: Apache Software Foundation
Specification-Title: Commons Lang
Implementation-Version: 2.4
Implementation-Vendor: Apache Software Foundation
Implementation-Title: Commons Lang
Implementation-Vendor-Id: org.apache
X-Compile-Source-JDK: 1.3
X-Compile-Target-JDK: 1.2

Alternatively you can use -p instead of -q -c.

-p extract files to pipe (stdout). Nothing but the file data is sent to stdout, and the files are always extracted in binary format, just as they are stored (no conversions).

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