Sep 30, '05 07:46:00AM • Contributed by: bluehz
Double-clicking these encrypted zip archives will (by default) open the BomArchiveHelper, and generate an error. The standard /usr/bin/zip install that comes with Mac OS X 10.4 does not support encrypted zip files. So I decided to set out to compile a newer version of zip -- thinking that replacing the binary in /usr/bin might allow for double-clickable encrypted zip archive compression.
Of course I didn't really think it through -- in the sense that you would need some facility for entering a password in the BomArchiveHelper application, and that does not appear to exist. So basically, my attempts at enabling the default BomArchiveHelper to open encrypted zip files failed. However, in the process, I was able to build a better CLI version of zip that does indeed support encrypted archives. So while I can't double-click these encrypted zip archives, I can decompress them using the terminal, which is fine by me. I can finally dump Stuffit.
The process for compiling zip from source is pretty straightforward. The first thing you'll need to do is get the newest version of zip from the project page. Get the regular zip program, version 2.31, from near the bottom of the page. Put the downloaded package in a new folder (I'll use one called zip-231 on my Desktop in the example below). Open the Terminal, and type the following commands (lines starting with # are comments; don't type those lines!):
$ cd ~/Desktop/zip-231
$ unzip zip231.zip
# make
$ make -f unix/Makefile generic_gcc
# install into /usr/local/bin
$ sudo make -f unix/Makefile install
# for some reason the man pages don't install
# so install manually
$ sudo cp man/zip.1 /usr/local/man/man1
After that, you can use the new version of zip to install password-protected zip archives.
[robg adds: I haven't tested this one...]
