Question

Hi all,

I need to make a zip file available to all my windows users visitors, so I naively produced a zip file with the unix zip command (let's call it madeinlinux.zip).

It opens successfully with WinRar or Winzip, but those of my users who are using the standard windows zip file handling experience failure when trying to unzip it. (Win XP)

I compressed the same data using windows built-in zip mecanism, and from a linux point of view, I cannot see any difference in the file type:

$ file madeinlinux.zip :  Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract
$ file madeinwindows.zip : Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract

They're must be something specific to a windows compatible zip file.

Does anyone knows what?

Cheers !!!

J.

Answer 1

Only thing that looks relevant is this

-k - Attempt  to  convert  the  names  and paths to conform to MSDOS, store only the MSDOS attribute (just the user write attribute from UNIX), and mark the entry as made under
MSDOS (even though it was not); for compatibility with PKUNZIP under MSDOS which cannot handle certain names such as those with two dots.

but do read "man zip" on your system before going anywhere else...

Answer 2

zip -Z sets the compression option. -Z store is the most trivial one, as it doesn't compress at all. This is useful when you're using zip as an alternative for tar, or when troubleshooting. In this case you should try to see if an uncompressed archive is usable from Windows. If that is usable, you know that you'll have to pick a non-default compression option.

Answer 3

Here is a python script that I am using to zip some files. It has been tested on ubuntu and Vista. A zip generated on Ubuntu opens with the Vista zipper.

I think that I had a similar issue in the past and it was because the zip format was not ZIP_DEFLATED. I am not sure. I will check that.

I hope it helps

import zipfile
import glob, os, sys

class ZipArchive:

    def zip_it(self, dirName, files):
        dirNamePrefix = dirName+"/*"
        for filename in glob.glob(dirNamePrefix):
            if os.path.isfile(filename) and (not self.exclude_svn or (filename.find(".svn\\")==-1)):
                print filename
                name = filename[len(self.folder)+1:]
                self.archive.write(filename, name, zipfile.ZIP_DEFLATED)

    def run(self, folder, name, exclude_svn):
        self.exclude_svn = exclude_svn
        self.folder = folder
        self.archive = zipfile.ZipFile(name+".zip", "w")
        os.path.walk(self.folder, ZipArchive.zip_it, self)
        self.archive.close()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    if (len(sys.argv)==1):
        print "usage zipit folder [name] [svn:yes|no]"
    else:
        name = sys.argv[1]
        exclude_svn = False

        if (len(sys.argv)>2): name = sys.argv[2]
        if (len(sys.argv)>3): exclude_svn = (sys.argv[3]=="no")

        arch = ZipArchive()
        arch.run(sys.argv[1], name, exclude_svn)
        print "done"

Answer 4

7zip is an open source compression tool that works on Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, BeOS, DOS, Amiga and Windows.

I would highly recommend it based on the windows version.

It supports

packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR

Unpacking only: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z.

Answer 5

@OP, did you try gzip instead?

Answer 6

@ghostdog74: gzip does definitely NOT open on windows, especially as it compresses only a single file, and is usually combined with tar when doing multiple files.