How to Compress and Extract Multipart Zip Files on Linux

This blog post explains how to create multipart zip files and then extract them in another host which runs on Linux, in case that the single zip file is too big to transport from one host to another. I will demonstrate this on CentOS host, other distributions will be similar, apart from installation command. 1. Firstly, you will need to install p7zip utility:

sudo yum -y install p7zip

2. Then, you can create archive file using below command:

7za -v100m a test.zip test

The above command tells 7za to create files with volume of 100MB each, the archive file name is test.zip and the source of the directory is “test”, which contains the files that you need to create archive from. My sample output looks like below:

[[email protected] ~]# 7za -v100m a test.zip test

7-Zip (a) [64] 16.02 : Copyright (c) 1999-2016 Igor Pavlov : 2016-05-21
p7zip Version 16.02 (locale=en_AU.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,64 bits,4 CPUs Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2686 v4 @ 2.30GHz (406F1),ASM,AES-NI)

Scanning the drive:
1500 folders, 7363 files, 1347676548 bytes (1286 MiB)

Creating archive: test.zip

Items to compress: 8863


Files read from disk: 7363
Archive size: 473633025 bytes (452 MiB)
Everything is Ok

3. The following files will be created under the current directory:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 104857600 Sep 16 20:26 test.zip.001
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 104857600 Sep 16 20:26 test.zip.002
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 104857600 Sep 16 20:26 test.zip.003
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 104857600 Sep 16 20:27 test.zip.004
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  54202625 Sep 16 20:27 test.zip.005

4. After all the files being transported to the destination host, you can run below command to unzip those files:

7za x test.zip.001

All you need to specify is the first splitted file with “.001” extension and 7za will manage to find the rest. My sample output looks like below:

[[email protected] ~]# 7za x test.zip.001

7-Zip (a) [64] 16.02 : Copyright (c) 1999-2016 Igor Pavlov : 2016-05-21
p7zip Version 16.02 (locale=en_AU.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,64 bits,4 CPUs Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2686 v4 @ 2.30GHz (406F1),ASM,AES-NI)

Scanning the drive for archives:
1 file, 209715200 bytes (200 MiB)

Extracting archive: test.zip.001
--
Path = test.zip.001
Type = Split
Physical Size = 209715200
Volumes = 3
Total Physical Size = 473633025
----
Path = test.zip
Size = 473633025
--
Path = test.zip
Type = zip
Physical Size = 473633025

Everything is Ok

Folders: 1500
Files: 7363
Size:       1347676548
Compressed: 473633025

Hope above helps.