How can I correctly decompress a ZIP archive of files with Hebrew names?

It sounds like the filenames are encoded in one of Windows' proprietary codepages (CP862, 1255, etc).

• Is there another decompression utility that will decompress my files with the correct names? I'm not aware of a zip utility that supports these code pages natively. 7z has some understanding of encodings, but I believe it has to be an encoding your system knows about more generally (you pick it by setting the LANG environment variable) and Windows codepages likely aren't among those.

  unzip -UU should work from the command line to create files with the correct bytes in their names (by disabling all Unicode support). That is probably the effect you got from GNOME's tool already. The encoding won't be right either way, but we can fix that below.

• Is there something wrong with the way the file was compressed, or is it just an incompatibility of ZIP implementations? Or even misfeature/bug of the Linux ZIP utilities? The file you've been given was not created portably. That's not necessarily wrong for an internal use where the encoding is fixed and known in advance, although the format specification says that names are supposed to be either UTF-8 or cp437 and yours are neither. Even between Windows machines, using different codepages doesn't work out well, but non-Windows machines have no concept of those code pages to begin with. Most tools UTF-8 encode their filenames (which still isn't always enough to avoid problems).

• What can I do to get the correct filenames after having decompressed using the garbled ones? If you can identify the encoding of the filenames, you can convert the bytes in the existing names into UTF-8 and move the existing files to the right name. The convmv tool essentially wraps up that process into a single command: convmv -f cp862 -t utf8 -r . will try to convert everything inside . from cp862 to UTF-8.

  Alternatively, you can use iconv and find to move everything to their correct names. Something like:

  find -mindepth 1 -exec sh -c 'mv "$1" "$(echo "$1" | iconv -f cp862 -t utf8)"' sh {} \;
  

  will find all the files underneath the current directory and try to convert the names into UTF-8.

  In either case, you can experiment with different encodings and try to find one that makes sense.

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After you've fixed the encoding for you, if you want to send these files back in the other direction it's possible you'll have the same problem on the other end. In that case, you can reverse the process before zipping the files up with -UU, since it's likely to be very hard to fix on the Windows end.

I had success with the command 7z x <source.zip>.

Version:

p7zip Version 16.02 (locale=utf8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,64 bits,[...])

Potentially relevant environment:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=UTF-8

It was able to decompress all files with 8-bit characters in their filenames, with some of these characters skipped, some garbled.

I have just had the same problem, and it turns out that my version of unzip that is available from Ubuntu repositories (UnZip 6.00 of 20 April 2009, by Debian. Original by Info-ZIP.) can handle automatic decoding of filenames if you specify the -a switch.

unzip -a stupid.zip