How do you remove META-INF from minecraft.jar without any manual file deletion?

Question

How can I remove META-INF from minecraft.jar, without administrator privileges? I can't install new software.

Answer 1

I'm not certain what you mean by "manual file deleting", but here's how to delete the META-INF folder.

You must open minecraft.jar in a program which can edit .zip files (such as 7-zip), then delete the META-INF folder as you would anything else. This should not require administrator privileges, as minecraft.jar resides inside your home folder, over which you have almost total control. On Windows, you can reach the correct folder by pressing Win+E (the Windows key is the one that looks like the Start menu) and typing %AppData%\.minecraft\bin in the text box at the top of the window which appears.

If you're not comfortable doing this yourself, you might ask someone with more computer experience to help you. A program or script could be written to do it for you, but that would require the installation of additional software on your computer (which typically does require administrator rights).

Answer 2

In addition to Ben Blank's answer, if you cannot install a zip application as you do not have administrator rights, you could just rename mincraft.jar.

As a .jar file is just a .zip file under another name, and if you are using Windows, which can now open .zip files as if they were directories, you can just rename minecraft.jar to minecraft.zip. You can now delete META-INF without installing any further apps. After this, be sure to rename the .zip back to .jar.

Linux should also have native zip readers, depending on the distro, and the minecraft data directory is in your /home/[usr]/.minecraft directory, which may be hidden from your file explorer UI as it starts with a dot.