Unzipping a Windows executable archive

Scott Ehrlich scott at MIT.EDU
Sun Apr 9 08:24:50 EDT 2006


On Sun, 9 Apr 2006, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> On Sat, 8 Apr 2006 17:23:07 -0400
> Ward Vandewege <ward at pong.be> wrote:
>
>> Odd - I have had success in the past using unzip on self-extracting .exe's
>> compressed with some zip compressor. Unzip was smart enough to ignore the
>> self-extracting wrapper and get to the embedded zipped data.
>
> gaf at gaf:~/downloads> unzip SP32158.exe
> Archive:  SP32158.exe
>  End-of-central-directory signature not found.  Either this file is not
>  a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive.  In the
>  latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on
>  the last disk(s) of this archive.
> unzip:  cannot find zipfile directory in one of SP32158.exe or
>        SP32158.exe.zip, and cannot find SP32158.exe.ZIP, period.

>From my experience with zip files, that error usually means the zip 
archive is messed up and should be rebuilt.

Or, the archive may have been created with a _newer_ version of a 
Windows-based version of zip your version of unzip cannot handle?

Scott



More information about the Discuss mailing list