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I'm getting an error when I try and zip a large file on Linux because it is too large for zip to deal with. Anyone know what commands I can use to get around this?

This is the error I'm getting:

zip error: Entry too big to split, read, or write (file exceeds Zip's 4GB uncompressed size limit)

It is a simple text file, log file in fact.

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Aug 5 '11 at 16:36

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use tar+gzip instead. –  moonshadow Aug 5 '11 at 16:18
Just split the file into 1GiB chunks and zip those. Or use a modern compression algorithm, you don't need an archive format in your case. –  BatchyX Aug 5 '11 at 16:20

2 Answers 2

up vote 5 down vote accepted

use the linux split command to chop your log file into smaller files.

and consider setting up log rotate so this doesn't happen again.

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Just adding this to support others users if they search for this. I used this command to split the file into 1Gb slices: split -b 1024m access_log2 access_log_ –  Matt Rogers Aug 5 '11 at 17:30

The basic Zip format has a limit of 4 GB per file. You need to upgrade your zip tool to one that supports Zip64:

$ zip -v

Zip special compilation options:
        ZIP64_SUPPORT        (use Zip64 to store large files in archives)

Alternatively, use a different archive format such as 7z or tar.

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