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]