Decompressing JAR File using Cygwin Posted on February 1, 2005 by Cory Foy Pretty straightforward tip – if you have a jar file you want to decompress, don’t have WinZip, but do have Cygwin, just rename the file with a .zip extension and use unzip in Cygwin to decompress it.
You don’t even need to bother renaming the file. However, you probably do want to exclude the manifest file, since that’s what jar does. Just add “-x META-INF/MANIFEST.MF” to the end of the unzip command.