Is Mac OS X’s Compress a “standard” zip

compressionzip

When I submit my research papers to an online review system, I prefer to upload all files (manuscript, figures, etc) by a single zip file, so that the review system can unzip the file. Otherwise, I have to upload many files one by one; time-consuming.

However, if I create a zip file using the Mac OS X's native Compress functionality, the review system tells it may be a corrupt file. Every time I try, it does same.

Instead if I use zip command in Terminal to create a zip file, it is fine.

What kind of zip technology does Compress use? Anything non-standard? Do you see any potential reasons for the fails?

Best Answer

As its man page states,

The compress utility reduces the size of files using adaptive Lempel-Ziv coding.

In contrast, the zip command (also present in Mac OS X, at least in Mountain Lion) uses a different algorithm. If a publisher is expecting a zip-compressed file, a file compressed with compress is something different, and will not work for this.

Related Solutions

How to compress a folder into multiple zip files

Use the -s switch on the zip command in terminal. So if your folder was called FolderName

zip -r -s 64 archive.zip FolderName/

64 is the size of the split (in this case 64Mb).

Use -s to set the split size and create a split archive.  
The size is  given  as  a  number  followed optionally  by  one  
of  k (kB), m (MB), g (GB), or t (TB) (the default is m). [1]

Use zipsplit to split a zip file in to multiple smaller zipfiles. Use the -n switch to set the size of the splits.

[1] http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/zip.1.html

Windows – Can .zip folders created using Windows XP Pro be opened and extracted on Mac without any additional software

Yes.

The PKZIP format used by Windows is understood by OS X and has been this way since about 10.3. The tool used to extract the contents is called Archive Utility and it is installed by default with every OS X installation.

Your Mac-using friend can either double-click on the archive in Finder to extract it or he can right-click/control-click and select the 'Open' option from the list of actions.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to compress a folder into multiple zip files

Windows – Can .zip folders created using Windows XP Pro be opened and extracted on Mac without any additional software

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