Zip 3.0 We have posted Zip 3.0, July 5th 2008. This is a major upgrade from Zip 2.32, the current Zip 2.x release. A quick summary of features is below, but see the file WhatsNew for the detailed list of major features and upgrades as well as what's on the list for Zip 3.1. Send in your feature suggestions and bug reports. Quick list of major changes in Zip 3.0: - Large files. Support for files and archives greater than 2 GB using large file I/O and the Zip64 extensions. Also can now have more than 64K entries in an archive. - Split archives. Zip now supports split archives, zip archives split into a set of files that can then be stored on removable media for instance. - Unicode. If Unicode support is enabled and supported on the system Zip is run on, Zip now can read paths not in the current character set and store those paths in portable UTF-8 format. These Unicode paths can then be used to partially or fully recreate the paths on other systems depending on the character set support provided by the unzip on the receiving system. In particular, this allows portability of paths between Windows and Unix. Unicode comments are also supported on systems where UTF-8 is the current character set. Unicode comment support for other systems is expected in Zip 3.1. - New command line parser. This new parser allows for command line permuting, where options can appear almost anywhere on the command line. This allows adding options to the end of the command line, for instance. It also supports long options, allowing for more readable command lines, and also allows lists for the -x exclude and -i include options to appear not just at the end of the command line. And some bugs in command line processing in Zip 2.32 have been fixed. - Unix 32-bit UIDs/GIDs. Now UIDs/GIDs larger than 16 bits are supported, but UnZip 6.0 is needed to restore these larger UIDs/GIDs. If Zip detects that the current system does not use 16-bit UIDs/GIDs, the old 16-bit UID/GID storage is not used as putting 32-bit UIDs/GIDs into 16-bit fields can cause problems. - New modes. Additional archive modes have been added, including a difference mode for supporting incremental backups, a file sync mode for synchronizing an existing archive with the current file system (which can be much faster than creating a new archive), and a copy mode that allows copying entries from one archive to another. - Compression using bzip2. Now can add bzip2 compression as a compression option in Zip. bzip2 compression can result in much more compact entries in some cases, but the user should verify that bzip2 is supported on the target unzip before using this new compression choice. - New Windows dll. The Windows dll has been updated to support the new Zip64 large file and larger number of entries limits. This new dll is not backward compatible with the Zip 2.32 dll, as the arguments to the dll have been updated to support the added capabilities, but modifying existing programs to use the new dll should be simple. See the included Visual Basic example project for details. - Better streaming and piping. Zip now has better support of streaming and piping and handles Unix FIFOs (named pipes) better. - Gobs of new progress information. Zip can now output progress information, such as how many entries processed and to go, how many bytes processed and to go, and adjustable size progress dots. If the initial file scan takes longer than about 5 seconds, Zip now outputs dots during the scan to avoid a long period of quiet. Zip can also now generate log files. - Updated archive fixing. The archive fixing capability is slightly improved, and now can fix split archives. - Windows Archive bit support. The Windows archive bit is now supported, though the new difference mode is probably more reliable than relying on the Windows archive bit for creating incremental backups. - File lists. Zip can list the files that would be added to an archive as well as the files in an existing archive. - Extended help. A new extended help option lists a very terse summary of the major features of Zip and how to use them. - Many bug fixes. As always, see the Zip manual page for details on what Zip has and how to use all features. Enjoy!