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

Try this excellent solution:

jar xvf COCR2_100.zip

steps:

  1. drag and drop file into terminal window.
  2. use keyboard arrows to navigate to start of line in terminal
  3. type jar xvf in front of your file name, remembering to leave space before the start of your file name.
  4. grab a beer and watch terminal work its magic as it extracts files.

The location of where the new files go varies, but usually best trick to find them is click on your computer name in Finder which should display most recent activity at top of all files.

If the jar command is not available, you can install fastjar by pasting the following in terminal:

sudo apt-get install fastjar

The problem is exactly what it says. Unzip can't find the line of code that signals the end of the archive, so either:

  1. The archive is corrupt.
  2. It is not a .zip archive.
  3. There are more than 1 parts to the archive, but that doesn't seem possible to me. You should try the other mirror too. It worked for me.

P.S. Notice how the program is made for Windows. So you need Wine (from http://www.winehq.com or the Ubuntu Software Center) to run it.


Unzipping with 7z worked for me:

7z x COCR2_100.zip

Install via APT with apt install p7zip-full.


I had a similar issue today and had some success with dd and gunzip. Try this:

dd if=corrupt.zip | gunzip -f > xx.csv

In my case I still got the "gunzip: stdin: unexpected end of file" error but at least I got some output to view.


Error can be caused by mixing up archive types:

I noticed that when using unzip, but on a gunzip (GNU) archive I would get this error, e.g.

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 create_tables.sql.gz or create_tables.sql.gz.zip, and cannot find create_tables.sql.gz.ZIP, period."

Using gunzip on this same archive performed without errors. !!