import urllib2, zipfile url = 'http://ipython.rossant.net/' filename = 'facebook.zip' downloaded = urllib2.urlopen(url + filename) folder = 'data' mkdir $folder cd $folder with open(filename, 'wb') as f: f.write(downloaded.read()) with zipfile.ZipFile(filename) as zip: zip.extractall('.') ls cd facebook ls %bookmark fbdata