Corrupt ZIP (broken central directory)

Handle it in code

Each snippet below was run against this exact file with Python 3.14.4 and Node 24.15.0 when this page was built, and the output shown is what it printed.

Python

Open it inside a try block and report the failure to the user, instead of letting a background job die on it later.

import zipfile

try:
    with zipfile.ZipFile("corrupt-central-directory.zip") as z:
        bad = z.testzip()   # reads every entry and checks its CRC
        print(f"corrupt entry: {bad}" if bad else "ok")
except zipfile.BadZipFile as e:
    print("rejected:", e)

Run against this file, it prints: rejected: Bad magic number for central directory