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I downloaded a torrent that contains a bunch of .zip files and a .diz file. I'm guessing it all should get pieced back into 1 bigger zip file. Any suggestions on how to use it?

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  • .diz? IIRC, that's just a text file. When in doubt, try notepad. Jan 10, 2011 at 22:41

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Scene” releases often include a .diz file that gives basic information about the release including the name of the release, the group that released it, the date, and the number of disks. The extension is 1337-speak for description (i.e., the file gives a “dizcr1pshun” of the release). It is usually accompanied by a larger .nfo (i.e., info​rmation) file which gives more detailed information about the release including details of what, if anything, has been ripped, crack information if applicable, boasts, “greets” to other groups, and rants about copycats.

Both .diz and .nfo files are usually plain-text and thus can be opened in any text editor (such as Notepad), however they frequently include ASCII-art which can only be seen when using the correct font. You can set the font to something like Terminal to see the art or you can use a specialized viewer (which may come with built-in fonts that support art-drawing characters) such as the DAMN NFO Viewer or NFOPad which may come with built-in fonts. These can also be associated with the .diz and .nfo filetypes for convenience.

NFO file as seen with different programs:

enter image description here


As for the multiple .zip files, they will likely contain parts of a spanned (usually RAR) archive. Just extract them all into the same folder (ignoring any duplicate files since there will likely be a separate copy of the .diz or .nfo in each one). Once you have extracted the multi-part archive, you can delete the .zip files, and then extract the spanned archive using the first volume (e.g., foobar.000, foobar.rar, etc.) Do not try to extract the other pats of the archive (e.g., foobar.004, foobar.r28`, etc.) because the archive program will automatically get to them.

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.diz is a scene convention for archive/package descriptions.

They are just plain text, and contain info about the package they're contained in.

.nfo is now more much more common, and is used for the same purpose.

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A .diz file is nothing more then a text description of what was included in the archive.

Right-click, open with wordpad/notepad.

For a bunch of zipfiles... get winzip/winrar/7-zip installed... Open the directory in question.. highlight all the zips files, right-click, extract.

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.DIZ (sometimes also .NFO) files are not really needed for the .ZIP files anyway, they normally contain some plaintext information about whatever you downloaded. Open them with a text editor like Notepad.

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    Notepad is a text editor, not a word processor.
    – paradroid
    Jan 10, 2011 at 22:46
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    Haha, yeah. I was gonna suggest something like Word first and then forgot to change that.
    – slhck
    Jan 11, 2011 at 9:55
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if you get a huge list of folders that are offered to be opened by winrar (r00 files), try using winzip to extract them to a seperate folder. After you do this open the first file (which usually contains the install/setup) and run it :D

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Since .DIZ and .NFO files often contain nice old-school ASCII art, if you're interested you can install GetDiz and associate it with these two extensions. This way, you can view these files properly without needing to mess around with fonts in Notepad (besides of course having to first locate fonts that can display all the extended ASCII characters properly).

As for the split RAR/ZIP archives, just use 7-Zip to open and extract the main .RAR/.ZIP archive (it will extract all the other parts as well). WinRAR, WinZIP etc. will also do if you have those installed already, but if not, 7-Zip if an excellent free alternative.

Note that sometimes the multiple archives may actually be separate non-linked archives, or even contain the split archive pieces inside (I've seen all sorts of weird multi-layer packaging schemes).

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In case anybody had the same problem as me, I wasn't given the option to open it with Notepad so I made a copy of the .diz file and changed the file extension to .nfo. This works and allows it to be easily read with Notepad.

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