Fun with IBM BPM iFixes - To ZIP or not to ZIP

I had an interesting experience this evening, whilst trying to install a set of iFixes for IBM BPM Advanced 8.5.5.

The iFixes - 8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes - come as a single ZIP file: -

-rw-r--r--  1 hayd  staff  2597328  3 Jan 02:06 8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes.zip

which, as far as I can establish, is NOT actually a ZIP file :-(

When I try and unpack it, I get this: -

unzip ~/Downloads/BPM855/8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes.zip

Archive:  /Users/hayd/Downloads/BPM855/8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes.zip
  End-of-central-directory signature not found.  Either this file is not
  a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive.  In the
  latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on
  the last disk(s) of this archive.
unzip:  cannot find zipfile directory in one of /Users/hayd/Downloads/BPM855/8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes.zip or
        /Users/hayd/Downloads/BPM855/8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes.zip.zip, and cannot find /Users/hayd/Downloads/BPM855/8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes.zip.ZIP, period.

on Mac OS X, and the same: -

unzip ~/8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes.zip 

Archive:  /home/wasadmin/8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes.zip
  End-of-central-directory signature not found.  Either this file is not
  a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive.  In the
  latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on
  the last disk(s) of this archive.
unzip:  cannot find zipfile directory in one of /home/wasadmin/8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes.zip or
        /home/wasadmin/8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes.zip.zip, and cannot find /home/wasadmin/8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes.zip.ZIP, period.

on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I Google'd for this: -

End-of-central-directory signature not found.

and got this: -

Error when unzipping a file

which said, in part: -

<snip>

Your file has a .zip name, but is not in zip format. Renaming a file doesn't change its content, and in particular doesn't magically transform it into a different format.

(Alternatively, the same error could happen with an incomplete zip file — but since that Archive Utility worked, this isn't the case.)

Run file user_file_batch1.csv.zip to see what type of file this is. It's presumably some other type of archive that Archive Utility understands.

</snip>

Taking this advice, I checked the file: -

file 8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes.zip

8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes.zip: RAR archive data, v1d, os: Win32

on Mac OS X and: -

file ~/8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes.zip 

/home/wasadmin/8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes.zip: RAR archive data, v1d, os: Win32

on RHEL.

Working on the assumption that I had a RAR file, I downloaded a copy of unrar for Linux - unrar-4.2.4-1.el5.x86_64.rpm - and extracted the file: -

unrar x ~/8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes.zip 

UNRAR 4.20 freeware      Copyright (c) 1993-2012 Alexander Roshal

Extracting from /home/wasadmin/8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes.zip

Creating    8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes  OK
Creating    8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes/atoc  OK
Extracting  8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes/atoc/atoc.xml  OK 
....

Extracting  8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes/plugins/com.ibm.ws.check.os.v80_8.0.2.20130111_1128.jar  OK 
Extracting  8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes/repository.config  OK 
Extracting  8.5.5.0-WS-BPM-SnapshotManagement-November.13.2014.iFixes/repository.xml  OK 
All OK

which is nice.

I will, of course, be feeding this back to IBM Support, but thought it may be worth sharing ....