How to fix garbled text in zip files on Linux

What I now do to fix garbled text in zip files is to use unar command (via terminal) from The Unarchiver project. It can guess character encoding so it should prevent garbled text. It should be packaged everywhere unlike unzip-natspec & p7zip-natspec.

Here’s how to use it:

unar file.zip

If that didn’t work, you can specify encoding:

unar -e cp932 file.zip

SteamOS (or other “immutable” distro)

SteamOS is an immutable OS, so you cannot use regular package managers. You instead have to use distrobox. (it should be installed by default)

1. create a new container

distrobox create -i archlinux -n tools

2. enter the container

distrobox enter tools

3. update package and install unar

sudo pacman -Syu unarchiver

4. export unar inside the container to SteamOS

distrobox-export --bin /usr/bin/unar --export-path ~/.local/bin

and finally, type exit to exit the container.