File too large zip error: Output file write failure

File too large zip error: Output file write failure

Recently while zipping a few directories for a clone, I got this error when the file size became greater than 2 GB.

File too large

zip error: Output file write failure (write error on zip file)

I tested the file system's ability to create files greater than 2 GB by creating a dummy 3GB file:

dd if=/dev/zero of=3gb-file bs=1024k count=3000

The 3 GB file got created without issues.

Then I checked the zip version.

$ zip -v
Copyright (c) 1990-2006 Info-ZIP - Type 'zip "-L"' for software license.
This is Zip 2.32 (June 19th 2006), by Info-ZIP.
Currently maintained by Onno van der Linden. Please send bug reports to
the authors using http://www.info-zip.org/zip-bug.html; see README for details.

So I checked http://www.info-zip.org

I clicked on the zip link: http://www.info-zip.org/Zip.html and found these lines:

Latest Release
New features in Zip 3.0, released 7 July 2008:


•large-file support (i.e., > 2GB)
•support for more than 65536 files per archive
•multi-part archive support
•bzip2 compression support
•Unicode (UTF-8) filename and (partial) comment support
•difference mode (for incremental backups)
•filesystem-synch mode
•cross-archive copy mode
•extended progress info and logging
•improved archive-fixing support
•improved streaming and piping
•improved command-line parser
•improved Unix FIFO support
•Unix 32-bit UIDs/GIDs (requires UnZip 6.0 to restore)

So I went to www.sunfreeware.com, downloaded zip 3.0 package and installed it on the server. Once zip 3.0 was installed, the zip command succeeded without errors