zipcmt

Zipcmt is the super-fast batch, zip file comment viewer, and extractor.

• Using a modern PC with the zip files stored on a solid-state drive, zipcmt handles many thousands of archives per second.
• Comments convert to Unicode text for easy viewing, editing, or web hosting.
  * comments can also be left as-is in their original CP437 or ISO-8859 text encoding.
• Rarely see duplicate comments to avoid those annoying lists of identical site adverts.
• Transfer the source zip file's last modification date over to any saved comments.
• Tailored to both Windows and POSIX terminal platforms.

preview.mp4

Downloads

Numerous downloads are available for Windows, Apple, Linux and more.

Plus Linux packages for Debian DEB, Fedora RPM, Arch ZST, Alpine APK.

There is also a legacy edition that works on Windows 7 and 8.

The download is a gzip compressed binary that is a standalone terminal application. Windows users can use File Explorer to decompress it.

# replace 'foo' with the remainder of the filename
$ gzip -d zipcmt_foo.gz

# after decompression, to confirm the download and version
$ zipcmt -v

Before use, macOS users will need to delete the 'quarantine' extended attribute that is applied to all program downloads that are not notarized for a fee by Apple.

$ xattr -d com.apple.quarantine zipcmt

Windows Performance

The out of the box performance on Windows is poor due to the Microsoft Defender Antivirus real-time protection. For a scan of 10,000 zip files should take one or two seconds, but with the real-time protection active it will take one or two minutes! To fix this either,

• Temporarily disable Virus & threat protection, Real-time protection in Windows Security
• Create Windows Security Exclusions for the folders to be scanned before running zipcmt

Usage

Example usage

Scan and print the comments

$ zipcmt test/

#  ── test/test-with-comment.zip ───────────┐
#    This is an example test comment for zipcmt.
#
# Scanned 4 zip archives and found 1 unique comment

Only print the comments

$ zipcmt --quiet test/

#   This is an example test comment for zipcmt.

Scan and save the comments

Linux, Apple...

$ zipcmt --noprint --save=~ test/

# Scanned 4 zip archives and found 1 unique comment

$ cat ~/test-with-comment-zipcomment.txt

#   This is an example test comment for zipcmt.

Windows PowerShell

$ zipcmt.exe --noprint --save='C:\Users\Ben\Documents' .\test\

# Scanned 4 zip archives and found 1 unique comment

$ type 'C:\Users\Ben\Documents\test-with-comment-zipcomment.txt'

#   This is an example test comment for zipcmt.

Usages online

Reddit user Iron_Slug in r/bbs created a huge online collection of BBS ads, many of which were captured using zipcmt.

The website Defacto2 has a large collection of uncurated BBS ads also captured using zipcmt.