a Mac OS X .[m]pkg unarchiver

About

I dislike .pkg files on Mac OS X. I don't like how they can touch any part of the system they want. Many times the installer files are useless anyway; all they do is make sure an app is installed in /Applications, for example, which I can handle myself, thank you very much. So this utility simply unpacks all the files in a package. Very handy, and GNU GPL free too!

Note: Unpkg does not touch you system at all except for the folder where the unpacking takes places. Because it does not move files around in your system (on purpose), you should not use unpkg to install, say, incremental OS X updates. But if you just need to get a kext from that package, for example, then unpkg is exactly what you need.

Features

5.0: Tested on macOS 26 Tahoe, should work down to macOS 11 Big Sur
4.8: macOS 12.3 support; untested on earlier versions
4.7: Native Apple Silicon support; Universal Binary (arm64 and x86_64)
4.6: macOS 10.15 Catalina compatible; x86_64 only
<=4.5: Supports 10.4.11 to 10.14; Universal Binary (i386 and ppc)
super quick, no non-sense unpacking
easy drag-'n'-drop interface
extracts both standard packages and metapackages ( .mpkg files)
does not require any passwords (unpack all those archives that want Administrator privileges!)
unpacks both old-style (10.4 and before) and new-style (10.5 and later) packages, even on 10.4
automatic unpacking of files to a folder named after the package in the same directory if possible, or the Desktop
good package detection (unpkg will not try to unpack something that's not a package, and easily handles malformed packages)
licensed under the GNU GPL
on GitHub. Clone and fork away!

pretty unpkg screenshot

Downloads

unpkg-5.0.dmg -- 2025-11-19

Ported from Python to Swift
New icon, thanks to Andy Zeng Houming

unpkg-4.8.zip -- 2022-03-20

Ported from Python 2 to 3 due to the former's deprecation in macOS 12.3

unpkg-4.7.zip -- 2021-03-14

Native Apple Silicon support: rebuild w/ arm64 and x86_64 binaries

unpkg-4.6.zip -- 2019-10-22

Rebuild as a 64 bit binary for macOS Catalina compatibility

unpkg-4.5.zip -- 2010-08-26

finally: metapackage extraction!
new progress bar interface
lots of behind-the-scenes changes and fixes

unpkg-4.0.zip -- 2009-01-16. we skipped 3.0 because it's so much better and different!

entirely re-written in Python
now works with multiple packages at once
also now extracts 10.5-style packages (nested ones, too, and in 10.4 as well!)
ripped out CocoaDialog, upgraded to a WebKit-based interface

unpkg-2.1.zip -- 2006-08-08

fixes for possible security holes. Thanks, Cameron!
make explicit the fact that this is released under the GNU GPL.

unpkg-2.0.zip -- 2006-06-14

now a Universal Binary!
completely new interface: no more text output, but pretty Cocoa dialogs and progress bars
- dialog boxes instead of text output
- file selection dialogs if no package is dragged onto unpkg's icon
- more file selection dialogs if unpkg can't save the file in the chosen location
- prettier error messages

Old release (PowerPC only...if you just absolutely need the outdated and ugly text-only interface): unpkg-1.61.zip -- 2005-06-27