Zip64 is also used for archives streamed from standard input as the size of such archives are not known in advance, but the option -fz- can be used to force zip to create PKZIP 2 compatible archives (as long as Zip64 extensions are not needed). zip automatically uses the Zip64 extensions when files larger than 4 GB are added to an archive, an archive containing Zip64 entries is updated (if the resulting archive still needs Zip64), the size of the archive will exceed 4 GB, or when the number of entries in the archive will exceed about 64K. See the EXAMPLES section at the bottom of this page for examples of some typical uses of zip. You must use PKUNZIP 2.04g or unzip 5.0p1 (or later versions) to extract them. Note that PKUNZIP 1.10 cannot extract files produced by PKZIP 2.04 or zip 3.0.

zip version 3.0 is compatible with PKZIP 2.04 and also supports the Zip64 extensions of PKZIP 4.5 which allow archives as well as files to exceed the previous 2 GB limit (4 GB in some cases). The zip and unzip programs can work with archives produced by PKZIP (supporting most PKZIP features up to PKZIP version 4.6), and PKZIP and PKUNZIP can work with archives produced by zip (with some exceptions, notably streamed archives, but recent changes in the zip file standard may facilitate better compatibility). It is analogous to a combination of the Unix commands tar and compress and is compatible with PKZIP (Phil Katz's ZIP for MSDOS systems).Ī companion program ( unzip) unpacks zip archives. Zip is a compression and file packaging utility for Unix, VMS, MSDOS, OS/2, Windows 9x/NT/XP, Minix, Atari, Macintosh, Amiga, and Acorn RISC OS. Some old command lines that depend on command line inconsistencies may no longer work. Note: Command line processing in zip has been changed to support long options and handle all options and arguments more consistently.

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