Cannot open large concatenated zip file with unzip, though it opened fine with Archive Utility, get a central directory error

Question

I have downloaded a 7Gb zip file full of pdfs and movies in four (4) parts from an ftp server. I concatenate these four files into a single zip file on my machine and it unzip just fine with my Mac's Archive Utility.

However, when I upload these files to my Red Hat server, I am unable to unzip this concatenated zip file. I get this error:

Archive:  science_team_meeting_archive.zip
warning [science_team_meeting_archive.zip]:  2491989543 extra bytes at beginning or within zipfile
(attempting to process anyway)
error [science_team_meeting_archive.zip]:  start of central directory not found;
zipfile corrupt.
(please check that you have transferred or created the zipfile in the
appropriate BINARY mode and that you have compiled UnZip properly)

Ideas?

Answer 1

Try

zip -F science_team_meeting_archive.zip -O science_team_meeting_archive.fixed.zip

If that doesn't work, you just need more 'F's

zip -FF science_team_meeting_archive.zip -O science_team_meeting_archive.fixed.zip

If either of these work, you then unzip normally with:

unzip science_team_meeting_archive.fixed.zip 

For more info about this, use:

man zip

Answer 2

7z x

I had the same issue with unzip %x on Linux for a .zip file larger than 4GB, compounded with a only DEFLATED entries can have EXT descriptor error.

The command 7z x resolved all my issues though.

Be careful though, the command 7z x will extract all files with a path rooted in the current directory. The option -o allows to specify an output directory.