It’s been a long time since I have talked about Linux, so here is something to get started again. This post talks about a common problem, “Corrupted Zip File” which people face while downloading zip files from the Internet.

Not all the zip files can be recovered but using a few simple commands, you can try and recover the content without having to re-download the file again.

You can easily repair “repairable” zip files downloaded on Linux by issuing the following command;

zip –F “filename.zip”

Issuing this command will tell the zip command to try to fix the zipfile if necessary. You can also issue the following command to make it the zip command work more harder on fixing the zip file.

zip –FF “filename.zip”

I initially used this command as a patch to a shell script that read contents from a zip file, that was uploaded by a wizard, the patch was put in for zip files which were corrupted when uploaded over slower Internet connections.

Here is a part of the shell script for the geeks and power users reading Techie Buzz.

   1: unzip -tqqq $x >> /dev/null;

   2:     if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then

   3:       #Run Recovery mode first - do not remove this code - kd

   4:       zip -FF $x;

   5:       unzip -tqqq $x >> /dev/null;

   6:       if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then

   7:         echo "Could not unzip $x. Renaming it to BADZIP-$x";

   8:         mv $x BADZIP-$x;

   9:         continue;

  10:       fi

  11:     fi

Enjoy and look forward to more Linux Tips.