Maybe I missed it in the article, but > the central directory might not reference all the files in the zip file because otherwise this statement about files be

Maybe I missed it in the article, but > the central directory might not reference all the files in the zip file because otherwise this statement about files being added, replaced, or delete has no point to be in the spec I think the author missed one optimization that I have observed from various archiving utilities. Suppose you want to compress deeply/nested/folders/with/one-file into an archive. Many archivers will not bother creating dedicated entries for deeply, nested, folders, etc. They will simply have a single entry with that path, and it is assumed that the intermediate folders exist. This threw me off at $DAYJOB when I needed to generate a flat list of "valid paths" in a ZIP archive, "valid" in the sense that the path exists after decompressing the archive. Note: I don't think this is good design of a file format, and although I've never been able to find documentation explicitly mentioning this behavior, I do believe this is the primary reason the central directory does not have to contain entries for each file/directory in an archive.