Unzip error "End-of-central-directory signature not found"

Question

I have a ZIP file that open in Windown/MS Word, (actually it is a .DOCX file). Opening it with LibreOffice / Mac produces:

General Error.
General input/output error.

File says:

../Commission Plan.docx: Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract

And unzip says:

Archive:  ../Commission Plan.docx
  End-of-central-directory signature not found.  Either this file is not
  a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive.  In the
  latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on
  the last disk(s) of this archive.
unzip:  cannot find zipfile directory in one of ../Commission Plan.docx or
  ../Commission Plan.docx.zip, and cannot find ../Commission Plan.docx.ZIP, period.

How do I open this file?

"perfectly good" does not seem like an apt description. Rather, this has the tell-tale of a DOCX file that has been downloaded from a WWW server that generates dynamic content but doesn't serve up DOCX files correctly. — JdeBP, Mar 12 '14 at 16:52
JdeBP, fair. I have no objective metric for "perfectly good", updated text. — William Entriken, Mar 12 '14 at 18:18

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:22

5

Use this alternate zip process to uncorrupt your file. (Idea based on answer at https://askubuntu.com/questions/54904/unzip-error-end-of-central-directory-signature-not-found)

mkdir DOCX
cd DOCX
jar xvf ../Commission\ Plan.docx
jar cvf ../Commission\ Plan2.docx *

This will decompress and recompress using the superior zip utility build into the java runtime on your system.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:22

Community

1

answered Mar 11 '14 at 20:19

William Entriken

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Is this solution working for anyone else too? – William Entriken Jul 07 '14 at 14:45
Thanks for asking, yes I did get paid the commission and it was great! – William Entriken Jan 19 '16 at 18:00
How does using `jar` differ from using `zip -FF`? – Pacerier Nov 26 '17 at 21:05

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 10 '17 at 14:25

3

Unzipping with 7z worked for me:

7z x COCR2_100.zip

Install via APT with apt install p7zip-full.

answered Sep 10 '17 at 14:25

Campa

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Unzip error "End-of-central-directory signature not found"

2 Answers2