Background

Many people in my company send ZIP archives as email attachments to save space which, on one side, makes sense but, on the other side, causes problems for me because I don't run Windows on most of my boxes and also don't want to shell out money for commercial tools like WinZip because the task at hand is too simple to pay for and the most important tools, namely Info-ZIP, are already available as open source.

However, I was wasting a lot of time looking at ZIP archives I received because I had to save the ZIP archives in some directory, open a shell and extract the archive into a temporary directory in order to look at individual files. Once done, I had to go back and delete all intermediate files, you name it....

Thus, I wrote a simple Python script which uses the command line tools from Info-ZIP to list the contents ZIP archives, extract individual files into a temporary directory and start the appropriate application to view them.