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Known, current PKZIP bugs/limitations:

-------------------------------------

 - PKUNZIP 2.04g is reported to corrupt some files when compressing them with

   the -ex option; when tested, the files fail the CRC check, and comparison

   with the original file shows bogus data (6K in one case) embedded in the

   middle.  PKWARE apparently characterized this as a "known problem."

 - PKUNZIP 2.04g considers volume labels valid only if originated on a FAT

   file system, but other OSes and file systems (e.g., Amiga and OS/2 HPFS)

   support volume labels, too.

 - PKUNZIP 2.04g can restore volume labels created by Zip 2.x but not by

   PKZIP 2.04g (OS/2 DOS box only??).

 - PKUNZIP 2.04g gives an error message for stored directory entries created

   under other OSes (although it creates the directory anyway), and PKZIP -vt

   does not report the directory attribute bit as being set, even if it is.

 - PKZIP 2.04g mangles unknown extra fields (especially OS/2 extended attri-

   butes) when adding new files to an existing zipfile [example:  Walnut Creek

   Hobbes March 1995 CD-ROM, FILE_ID.DIZ additions].

 - PKUNZIP 2.04g is unable to detect or deal with prepended junk in a zipfile,

   reporting CRC errors in valid compressed data.

 - PKUNZIP 2.04g (registered version) incorrectly updates/freshens the AV extra

   field in authenticated archives.  The resultant extra block length and total

   extra field length are inconsistent.

 - [Windows version 2.01] Win95 long filenames (VFAT) are stored OK, but the

   file system is always listed as ordinary DOS FAT.

 - [Windows version 2.50] NT long filenames (NTFS) are stored OK, but the

   file system is always listed as ordinary DOS FAT.

 - PKZIP 2.04 for DOS encrypts using the OEM code page for 8-bit passwords,

   while PKZIP 2.50 for Windows uses Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1).  This means an

   archive encrypted with an 8-bit password with one of the two PKZIP versions

   cannot be decrypted with the other version.

 - PKZIP for Windows GUI (v 2.60), PKZIP for Windows command line (v 2.50) and

   PKZIP for Unix (v 2.51) save the host's native file timestamps, but

   only in a local extra field. Thus, timestamp-related selections (update

   or freshen, both in extraction or archiving operations) use the DOS-format

   localtime records in the Zip archives for comparisons. This may result

   in wrong decisions of the program when updating archives that were

   previously created in a different local time zone.

 - PKZIP releases newer than PKZIP for DOS 2.04g (PKZIP for Windows, both

   GUI v 2.60 and console v 2.50; PKZIP for Unix v 2.51; probably others too)

   use different code pages for storing filenames in central (OEM Codepage)

   and local (ANSI / ISO 8859-1 Codepage) headers. When a stored filename

   contains extended-ASCII characters, the local and central filename fields

   do not match. As a consequence, Info-ZIP's Zip program considers such

   archives as being corrupt and does not allow to modify them. Beginning

   with release 5.41, Info-ZIP's UnZip contains a workaround to list AND

   extract such archives with the correct filenames.

   Maybe PKWARE has implemented this "feature" to allow extraction of their

   "made-by-PKZIP for Unix/Windows" archives using old (v5.2 and earlier)

   versions of Info-ZIP's UnZip for Unix/WinNT ??? (UnZip versions before

   v 5.3 assumed that all archive entries were encoded in the codepage of

   the UnZip program's host system.)

 - PKUNZIP 2.04g is reported to have problems with archives created on and/or

   copied from Iomega ZIP drives (irony, eh?).

Known, current WinZip bugs/limitations:

--------------------------------------

 - [16-bit version 6.1a] NT short filenames (FAT) are stored OK, but the

   file system is always listed as NTFS.

 - WinZip doesn't allow 8-bit passwords, which means it cannot decrypt an

   archive created with an 8-bit password (by PKZIP or Info-ZIP's Zip).

 - WinZip (at least Versions 6.3 PL1, 7.0 SR1) fails to remove old extra

   fields when freshening existing archive entries. When updating archives

   created by Info-ZIP's Zip that contain UT time stamp extra field blocks,

   UnZip cannot display or restore the updated (DOS) time stamps of the

   freshened archive members.

Known, current other third-party Zip utils bugs/limitations:

------------------------------------------------------------

 - Asi's PKZip clones for Macintosh (versions 2.3 and 2.10d) are thoroughly

   broken. They create invalid Zip archives!

   a) For the first entry, both compressed size and uncompressed length

      are recorded as 0, despite the fact that compressed data of non-zero

      length has been added.

   b) Their program creates extra fields with an (undocumented) internal

      structure that violates the requirements of PKWARE's Zip format

      specification document "appnote.txt": Their extra field seems to

      contain pure data; the 4-byte block header consisting of block ID

      and data length is missing.

Possibly current PKZIP bugs:

---------------------------

 - PKZIP (2.04g?) can silently ignore read errors on network drives, storing

   the correct CRC and compressed length but an incorrect and inconsistent

   uncompressed length.

 - PKZIP (2.04g?), when deleting files from within a zipfile on a Novell

   drive, sometimes only zeros out the data while failing to shrink the

   zipfile.

Other limitations:

-----------------

 - PKZIP 1.x and 2.x encryption has been cracked (known-plaintext approach;

   see http://www.cryptography.com/ for details).

[many other bugs in PKZIP 1.0, 1.1, 1.93a, 2.04c and 2.04e]