On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 smac at visi.com wrote:

> Maybe a machine with a 64bit processor would be able to unzip the file. 64bit
> can address 16tb of memeory, with a 64bit operating system.

According to what I've read, the problem is related to how PKWare decided 
to implement large file support inside the archive.  That is, this is not 
a memory addressing issue, filesystem issue, or an issue with Lempel-Ziv 
(well, obviously if the underlying filesystem can't handle these large 
files, it doesn't matter anyways...but I'm assuming if he's working with a 
4GB file, that his underlying OS is capable of handling it.  Just like I'm 
assuming he's got more than 4GB of disk space)

They did some hackery like changing the ZIP header for these larger files, 
to identify them to be parsed in a different way when being uncompressed. 
The hackery was not well documented, so the Info-Zip developer is unable 
to duplicate it without a significant time investment.

If anyone is interested, I wrote a perl implementation of LZ a number of 
years ago.  It could compress and uncompress just fine, although it turned 
out to be lossy (my program, not LZ).

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