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Fixing unzip on Alpine Linux

Last updated on 27 September 2022

Alpine Linux ships with several BusyBox [1] utilities, including many day-to-day shell commands.

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One such example is the unzip tool for extracting ZIP files.

Recently, when unzipping a large archive on Alpine, I kept getting this short read error message:

$ unzip archive.zip 
Archive:  archive.zip
unzip: short read
$ 

I tried re-creating the archive a few times to see if it was an issue with the zip file itself, but to no avail. I still don't know what the short read error is referring to, but the only thing I can think of is the size of the file (around 100GB).

Fixing the issue

To fix this, simply install the "full" unzip binary using apk:

apk add unzip

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