Alpine Linux ships with several BusyBox utilities, including many day-to-day shell commands.
One such example is the unzip tool for extracting ZIP files.
Recently, when unzipping a large archive on Alpine, I kept getting this short read error message:
$ unzip archive.zip
Archive: archive.zip
unzip: short read
$
I tried re-creating the archive a few times to see if it was an issue with the zip file itself, but to no avail. I still don’t know what the short read error is referring to, but the only thing I can think of is the size of the file (around 100GB).
Fixing the issue
To fix this, simply install the “full” unzip binary using apk:
apk add unzip