Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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BEFORE YOU ASK: UnZip, its companion utility Zip, and related utilities
and support files can be found in many places; read the file "WHERE" for
further details. To contact the authors with suggestions, bug reports,
or fixes, continue reading this file (README) and, if this is part of a
source distribution, the file "ZipPorts" in the proginfo directory. Also
in source distributions: read "BUGS" for a list of known bugs, non-bugs
and possible future bugs; INSTALL for instructions on how to build UnZip;
and "Contents" for a commented listing of all the distributed files.
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GENERAL INFO
------------
UnZip is an extraction utility for archives compressed in .zip format (also
called "zipfiles"). Although highly compatible both with PKWARE's PKZIP
and PKUNZIP utilities for MS-DOS and with Info-ZIP's own Zip program, our
primary objectives have been portability and non-MSDOS functionality.
For source distributions, see the main Contents file for a list of what's
included, and read INSTALL for instructions on compiling (including OS-
specific comments). The individual operating systems' Contents files (for
example, vms/Contents) may list important compilation info in addition to
explaining what files are what, so be sure to read them. Some of the ports
have their own, special README files, so be sure to look for those, too.
See unzip.1 or unzip.txt for usage (or the corresponding UnZipSFX, ZipInfo,
fUnZip and ZipGrep docs). For VMS, unzip_def.rnh or unzip_cli.help may be
compiled into unzip.hlp and installed as a normal VMS help entry; see
vms/descrip.mms.
For the UnZip 6.0 release, we want to give special credit to Myles Bennet,
who started the job of supporting ZIP64 extensions and Large-File (> 2GiB)
and provided a first (alpha-state) port.
The 5.52 maintenance release fixes a few minor problems found in the 5.51
release, closes some more security holes, adds a new AtheOS port, and
contains a Win32 extra-field code cleanup that was not finished earlier.
The most important changes are:
- repair a serious bug in the textmode output conversion code for the 16-bit
ports (16-bit MSDOS, OS/2 1.x, some variants of AMIGA, possibly others)
which was introduced by the Deflate64 support of release 5.5
- fix a long standing bug in the the inflate decompression method that
prevented correct extraction in some rare cases
- fixed holes in parent dir traversal security code (e.g.: ".^C." slipped
through the previous version of the check code)
- fixed security hole: check naming consistency in local and central header
- fixed security hole: prevent extracted symlinks from redirecting file
extraction paths
The main addition in the 5.5 release is support for PKWARE's new Deflate64(tm)
algorithm, which appeared first in PKZIP 4.0 (published November 2000).
As usual, some other bugfixes and clean-ups have been integrated:
The 5.42 maintenance release fixes more bugs and cleans up the redistribution
conditions:
The 5.41 maintenance release adds another new port and fixes some bugs.
The 5.4 release adds new ports, again. Other important items are changes
to the listing format, new supplemental features and several bug fixes
(especially concerning time-stamp handling...):
- new IBM OS/390 port, a UNIX derivate (POSIX with EBCDIC charset)
- complete revision of the MacOS port
- changed listing formats to enlarge the file size fields for more digits
- added capability to restore directory attributes on MSDOS, OS/2, WIN32
- enabled support of symbolic links on BeOS
- Unix: optional Acorn filetype support, useful for volumes exported via NFS
- several changes/additions to the DLL API
- GUI SFX stub for Win16 (Windows 3.1) and Win32 (Windows 9x, Windows NT)
- new free GCC compiler environments supported on WIN32
- many time-zone handling bug fixes for WIN32, AMIGA, ...
The 5.32 release adds two new ports and a fix for at least one relatively
serious bug:
The 5.31 release included nothing but small bug-fixes and typo corrections,
with the exception of some minor performance tweaks.
The 5.3 release added still more ports and more cross-platform portability
features:
Although the DLLs are still basically a mess, the Windows DLLs (16- and 32-
bit) now have some documentation and a small example application. Note that
they should now be compatible with C/C++, Visual BASIC and Delphi. Weirder
languages (FoxBase, etc.) are probably Right Out.
INTERNET RESOURCES
------------------
Info-ZIP's web site is at http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/
and contains the most up-to-date information about coming releases,
links to binaries, and common problems.
(See http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/FAQ.html for the latter.)
Files may also be retrieved via ftp://ftp.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/ .
Thanks to LEO (Munich, Germany) for previously hosting our primary site.
DISTRIBUTION
------------
If you have a question regarding redistribution of Info-ZIP software, either
as is, as packaging for a commercial product, or as an integral part of a
commercial product, please read the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section
of the included COPYING file. All Info-ZIP releases are now covered by
the Info-ZIP license. See the file LICENSE. The most current license
should be available at http://www.info-zip.org/license.html and
ftp://ftp.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/license.html.
Insofar as C compilers are rare on some platforms and the authors only have
direct access to a subset of the supported systems, others may wish to pro-
vide ready-to-run executables for new systems. In general there is no prob-
lem with this; we require only that such distributions include this README
file, the WHERE file, the LICENSE file (contains copyright/redistribution
information), and the appropriate documentation files (unzip.txt and/or
unzip.1 for UnZip, etc.). If the local system provides a way to make self-
extracting archives in which both the executables and text files can be
stored together, that's best (in particular, use UnZipSFX if at all possible,
even if it's a few kilobytes bigger than the alternatives); otherwise we
suggest a bare UnZip executable and a separate zipfile containing the re-
maining text and binary files. If another archiving method is in common
use on the target system (for example, Zoo or LHa), that may also be used.
Suggestions for new features can be discussed on the new Discussion Forum.
A new mailing list for Info-ZIP beta testers and interested parties may
be created someday, but for now any issues found in the betas should use
the forum. We make no promises to act on all suggestions or even all
patches, but if it is something that is manifestly useful, sending the
required patches to Zip-Bugs directly (as per the instructions in the
ZipPorts file) is likely to produce a quicker response than asking us to
do it--the authors are always ridiculously short on time. (Please do
NOT send patches or encoded zipfiles to the Info-ZIP list. Please DO
read the ZipPorts file before sending any large patch. It would be
difficult to over-emphasize this point...)
If you are considering a port, not only should you read the ZipPorts file,
but also please check in with Zip-Bugs BEFORE getting started, since the
code is constantly being updated behind the scenes. (For example, VxWorks,
VMOS and Netware ports were once claimed to be under construction, although
we have yet to see any up-to-date patches.) We will arrange to send you the
latest sources. The alternative is the possibility that your hard work will
be tucked away in a subdirectory and mostly ignored, or completely ignored
if someone else has already done the port (and you'd be surprised how often
this has happened).
http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/FAQ.html#lists
(Please note that as of late May 2004, the lists are unavailable pending
a move to a new site; we hope to have them restored shortly. In the
interim ...) Feel free to use our bug-reporting web page for bug reports
and to ask questions not answered on the FAQ page above:
http://www.info-zip.org/zip-bug.html
For now the best option is to monitor and contribute to the various threads
on the new discussion forum site at:
http://www.info-zip.org/board/board.pl
There is also a closed mailing list for internal discussions of our core
development team. This list is now kept secret to prevent us from being
flooded with spam messages.