Recover broken docx

By Jonas Plum on May 13, 2014

Today a friend of me asked me to recover a docx document. MS Word called this document broken.

docx is essentially a zip file. The command zip -F broken.docx --out restore.zip tries to restore the file. Well no success. zip -FF broken.docx --out restore.zip tries harder! Afterwards unzip restore.zip unzips the file. The file document.xml in the folder word contains the actual text data from the word document. Unfortunately in my case the document.xml was half empty :( Zip commands are taken from: http://computers.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-repair-damaged-zip-files-with-terminal--mac-49294