🦋 The Scales Fall from my Eyes
Yesterday one of my batch processes stopped working. I was a little baffled. The batch downloads some files from an ftp site, then expands them using pkunzip, then sends them to a program for processing. Pkunzip was telling me that I needed version 4.5 or later to expand the files -- never a problem in the past. I thought maybe the vendor had changed zip formats, which struck me as pretty bizarre. Everywhere on the web that I could find pkunzip, it was the same version as the one I was using (2.03g). And then I thought to try opening the files in WinZip. That worked of course; and I was very happy to discover that a command-line add-in is now available, along with a new version of WinZip. So... problem solved! (And into the bargain, wzunzip is way faster than the pkunzip I was using.) But what was the problem? It hit me when I was reading the "What's New" page in the WinZip 9.0 help file: In addition to supporting the original Zip file format, WinZip 9.0 also supports the 64-bit extensions to the Zip file format. The extended format lets you store all the data you need in Zip files of virtually unlimited size. The original Zip file format limited the number of member files in a Zip file to 65,535, and the maximum size of both the Zip file itself and any member file to 4 gigabytes. For all practical purposes, the 64-bit extended format eliminates all these restrictions. Using the extended format, the member file size, Zip file size, and number of member files you can add to a Zip file are limited only by your system's resources. So I checked and yep, the file size of the download is now a hair over 4G!
posted afternoon of Friday, March 12th, 2004
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