Last update: 09/02/2004 15:55:35

RSP Info-Zip known bugs

This page will list known bugs in the Info-Zip compression method

We are providing it in order to help the fixes of these problems and generation of workarounds

All the problems listed here has fixes in the RSP Zip Compressor OCX , or at least workarounds

At this moment many Zip based software is using the Info-Zip to handle Zip files , Winzip is one of them , and the options available to control the compression or decompression are so large that is almost impossible to test all the possibilities , and since the code is generated in a way to be used without modifications in tons of plataforms , what work in one plataform may not work as expected in another plataform , this is exactly what cause the problems

In this page we will discuss about some limitations that we found during these years working with the Info-zip compression  method


1 - The info-zip cannot handle the creation of  paths with spaces in the middle , like this "c:\my path to create\mypath" , in some cases it will return a vague error , in other case the path will be generated
It will requires code to create the path before the execution or replacement of the original code with a different path creation routine free of bugs

2 - The case may change from the compression and the decompression , the compression is case insensitive by default , and the decompression is case sensitive by default , workaround required

3 - Unexpected access errors when UNC paths are used , workaround required

4 - Selection of .zip extension for files without extension , workaround required

5 - Search for diferent files other than the file selected when a file without extension is passed , if you pass rsp it may open rsp.zip instead , workaround required

6 - Different behavior depending on the sequence of commands passed to the command line version , in some cases some arguments are not evaluated at all

7 - The selection of *.* will not include files that don't have an extension

8 - The original Info-zip code don't have yet support to multiples volumes

9 - When compiled with mingw32 the zip code don't handle correctly the commands passed via console , it only work correctly when compiled with msvc compiler

10 - If occurs an error when zipping , the zip file will not be closed on exit , the problem is located in the ziperr function on the file zip.c in the Info-Zip zip distribution 2.3 , the problem only affect people using reentrant code like a dll , that will not return the control to the system and remain in the memory for subsequent call

11 - A bug  was found on the fileio.c on the zip 2.3 distribution that will not free some memory allocations to the pointers iname and zname , the problem can be seen with a hook on the malloc and free ANSI C library functions

12 - If the zip file is open and you try to add files , the zip will only catch the problem in the end , and instead reporting that the file is open , it will report a "severe error on zip file" that is wrong , the problem is that it cannot update a file that is open

More known limitations will be added in the future