Hello,
Our system on a Redhat platform is generating ZIP archives that we then send to another system on a Windows machine. I have no issue generating a ZIP file containing up to 2GB worth of data and 350k files, I can unzip all contents on the machine with no issue, however the remote system on Windows is using WinZip 17 to extract the files and it has a limitation of maximum 65k files in the ZIP.

I am therefore exploring the possibility to send them a zipx archive instead, as they are convinced they would be able to handle this volume of files in this format, however I can't find anything on the internet showing zipx support for Redhat? I know zipx is quite a new format, but I´m surprised I can't find any library on the internet that I could test on my machine. Any advice?

Thanks & Regards
Yann

7zip on windows - free. Create a tar archive on RH. Zip the one archive.
Send it to windows. Unzip and then untar using 7zip.

The unsigned short limit of 65K is an old zip issue. This is why people tar up large numbers of files, then zip just one tar archive.

Thanks for replying. So something like TAR everything and ZIP the single file. Alright, that's one thing I haven't tested yet. I assume this 7zip tool can be imvoked as part of an automated process.

I´ve already tried to gzip every indivual file, tar everything and send the single file. I´ve tried TGZ as well, but both "solutions" are time consuming.

Otherwise I came up with the alternative to split the files into 50k "blocks" (thus flying under the limitation) and send multiple ZIP archives (between 1 and 6 basically in our case) but I actually think the solution is bad.

EDIT: Is it a fair assumption to say that most businesses would opt for a solution involving TAR?

It depends on what software the businesses have available. I know I've had problems with GNU tar and large files on Windows systems.

7zip sounds like a good option to me, know for a fact it works well in UNIX and windows.

We´ve also had problems with 3.5-4GB tar files on Windows 32-bit systems so that's definately something we need to simulate before going for it. One of the main problems is that it takes so much time for the Windows system to process the ZIP/TAR file that you don't know whether that's the standard time to deal with files of that size or if the application is actually hanging or unstable (in terms of abnormal cpu usage).

And then our customer is trying to push us for WinZip despite the technical limitations because of their mindset towards open source and freeware software. So I´m kind of caught between the technical constraints and applications doing the job only partially (screaming for bad designs or workarounds).

Anyway, I´ll give this a go. Thanks.