Just a very quick blog post that will hopefully save you a lot of time and frustration if you’re running Mac OSX and having trouble opening a .zip file. The symptoms: You download a .zip file, lets call it ‘downloads.zip’ and double click to open it as usual, just as you’ve done many times before, right?
Only this time, you don’t see an un-archived folder, you see either a duplicate named ‘downloads_2.zip’ or a file called ‘downloads.zip.cpgz’ So you double click again and you see the same thing, just another numbered suffix… Frustrating, yes? Our friend Google throws up no end of discussion threads of frustration and well meaning advice, but I spend hours following it all to no avail until a tiny comment burind deep in a thread got me the answer.
If you’re getting the symptoms above and you’re constantly seeing the stuck in the loop .cpgz suffix appearing, try right clicking on your original .zip file and take a look at the file size. If it’s an unfeasibly low 22kb as mine was, for example, then it’s obvious that you’ve got a duff download. Try getting a fresh copy.
So what’s happening is that someone at Apple has a sense of humour and instead of flagging up a fault and warning you that there’s nothing there, it packs it up as a .cpgz file. Very funny, guys, didn’t have anything else to do this evening….
Was this useful?
You might like to read my eBook on the top ten ways to take better car photographs without buying any more gear. Just $3, click for more details or use the button below to buy right away
51 pages of tips to get the best car photographs, whatever camera you have.
when a large .zip file is being downloaded, it is temporarily in two parts. these two parts should be a .zip file (very small) and a .part file. if the .zip file is opened before the download is completed, then the .cpgz file will result and the loop will continue.
The solution then, is simple! just make sure the download has finished by checking your download pane or wait for the .part file to disappear/combine into the full .zip file!
Hope this helps!
Thanks for posting this – one follow up question. What do you do if all your .jpg icons now show as CPGZ with zip icon on your desktop? The file itself is fine and named.jpg but the actual icon shows as a zip typ file (white icon with zipper down it and words CPGZ on it.
I was just now experiencing this problem, except the zipfiles were not parts but stand-alone zipfiles. I would try to open the zip and i’d get the same thing with the cpgz suffix. Then I tried Stuffit Expander instead of Mac’s Archive Utility and the zip opened right up.
Hi Guys The reason mac’s archive utility turns a .zip into a .cpgz file is usually one of 2 reasons its either corrupt like stated in the blog above or more commonly the .zip is over 2GB in size which can not be handled by the standard archive utility in mac, to get around this you need to grab a copy of Stuffit Deluxe and open the .zip from there, once you do this you will see the file extracts in the proper manner to your desired location.
Cheers
D.
Yep, over 2 GB is the problem. Used VMware running Win7 to unzip.
I’ve tried TinyExpander, the Unarchiver, Betterzip, Stuffit Expander, Springy etc.
My problem has been that our IT Dept. has been posting a zip file early in the day to a particular ftp site. Said zip is supposed to contain a few folders, one of which contains xml files that I need to pull. What’s been happening is that this zip file is begin created automatically even if there’s not content to stuff. Result: an empty zip file. Springy showed me content in a separate window and the # of folders and file at the bottom — all was empty and showing “0 files in 0 folders”.
This happened yesterday and later in the day I downloaded the folder from the same ftp site and it unzipped OK. So, at least in my case, the problem was an empty ZIP file! — Steve Olson
I forget to mention… in each attempt to unstuff (with different utilities) I too ended up with the “cpgz” extension: STDNF_2012-05-10_09-54.zip.cpgz.
I can’t get mine to unzip on my mac. It says “the structure of the archive is damaged.” when I use Stuffit Expander. When I just click on it it turns it in to a .zip.cpgz file. And it keeps going in a circle. The file is only 6.9MB so I’m not sure what the problem is. The person sent the same file to someone on a PC and it opened fine, my mac is having an issue with it which has never happened before. Thoughts?
Same to me, just a file of 726kB downloaded by Maven to my home folder I get the same errors as kim has
just use the command: unzip path/to/zipfile.zip in terminal.
Source: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120326045439340
i can’t find Stuffit Deluxe. Is there another?