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User profile for user: rjwebber72
rjwebber72 Author
User level: Level 1
8 points

Can't extract large .zip file

@cherilynn1030 posted that she couldn't extract files from a large (32GB) zip file. unzip -t reported "End-of-central-directory signature not found", so she concluded the file was corrupted.


I REALLY hope you haven't deleted the file. I have had the same issue while backing up files and have found that the version of unzip on my 2015 MacBook Pro will report this error for any file over 4GB. But the zip files are NOT corrupted!


The workaround is to run zipsplit -n 3000000000 on the file to break it into small zip files of < 4GB. Each of these files will then be unzippable.


The only issue I've found is that zip split won't work if the zip file contains a single file that is larger than the split size (3GB in the example above) - but that shouldn't be a problem for a photo archive.


I hope that works for you :-)


Posted on Sep 10, 2019 3:43 AM

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User profile for user: MrHoffman
MrHoffman
Community+ 2024
User level: Level 10
127,261 points

Posted on Sep 10, 2019 9:40 AM

That error probably means an older version of unzip. (zip -v and unzip -v will show the versions.) OS X shipped with versions prior to zip 3.0 and unzip 6.0 for quite a while, and those older versions cannot access zip archives larger than around two gigabytes. Recent versions of macOS do have at least 3.0 and 6.0, and folks using older OS X and older zip and unzip versions can get zip and unzip updates from homebrew.

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User profile for user: MrHoffman
MrHoffman
Community+ 2024
User level: Level 10
127,261 points

Sep 10, 2019 9:40 AM in response to rjwebber72

That error probably means an older version of unzip. (zip -v and unzip -v will show the versions.) OS X shipped with versions prior to zip 3.0 and unzip 6.0 for quite a while, and those older versions cannot access zip archives larger than around two gigabytes. Recent versions of macOS do have at least 3.0 and 6.0, and folks using older OS X and older zip and unzip versions can get zip and unzip updates from homebrew.

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Can't extract large .zip file

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