Workaround: Rational Team Concert SDK .zip fails to extract on Windows because of long file path

Author: Li Zhu, IBM Canada and Martha DasSarma
Last updated: 28 January 2014
Build Basis: All versions of Rational Team Concert with Rational Team Concert SDK .zip

Workaround summary

Use a third-party extraction tool, such as 7-Zip 9.20 or higher (http://www.7-zip.org/), to extract the Rational Team Concert SDK .zip on a Windows platform.

Problem

The Rational Team Concert SDK .zip contains files with pathnames that are longer than 255 characters. This causes the native Windows extraction tool to fail when extracting the .zip. The failure displays a window showing an error:

The Windows API limits a file pathname to 255 characters, including the drive letter.

Workaround

To successfully extract the Rational Team Concert SDK .zip on Windows, do the following:

1. If you do not have 7-Zip installed, download 7-Zip 9.20 or higher from 7-Zip and install it. The version of 7-zip is important, as earlier versions can have unexpected errors while extracting the zip.
2. Use 7-Zip to extract the Rational Team Concert SDK .zip.

   Note: The functionality and usability of the SDK is not affected by long pathnames.

Related information

For more information, see the following work item:

• 287481: RTC SDK 4.0.4 is unusable on Windows when extracted with native Zip (workaround use 7-zip instead)
• 298512: Unzipping SDK using 7-Zip command line throws up a few failures