ZipFileSystem is a file system provider that treats the contents of a zip or JAR file as a java.nio.file.FileSystem. The factory methods defined by the java.nio.file.FileSystems class can be used to create a FileSystem, eg: // use file type detection Path jarfile = Paths.get("foo.jar"); FileSystem fs = FileSystems.newFileSystem(jarfile, null); -or // locate file system by the legacy JAR URL syntax Map env = Collections.emptyMap(); URI uri = URI.create("jar:file:/mydir/foo.jar"); FileSystem fs = FileSystems.newFileSystem(uri, env); Once a FileSystem is created then classes in the java.nio.file package can be used to access files in the zip/JAR file, eg: Path mf = fs.getPath("/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF"); InputStream in = mf.newInputStream(); See Demo.java for more interesting usages.