Let’s say I had a simple ant script which looked a little something like this:
<project name=”unzipstuff” default=”unzip”>
<target name=”unzip”>
<unzip src=”/home/webapps/edwinstarr.war” dest=”/home/webapps/edwin/starr/” >
</unzip>
</target>
</project>
Why oh why oh why oh why (etc and so on) would it fail with the following error?
BUILD FAILED
java.lang.RuntimeException: data starting at 0 is in unknown format
at org.apache.tools.zip.ZipEntry.setExtra(ZipEntry.java:272)
at org.apache.tools.zip.ZipFile.resolveLocalFileHeaderData(ZipFile.java:454)
at org.apache.tools.zip.ZipFile.<init>(ZipFile.java:153)
Is the .war file screwed up? If so, why does it extract ok if I do it manually? I wasted approximately 4 hours of my life on this before embarking on a convoluted and silly workaround which is leaving me feeling defeated.
DevOpsNet 
ANT Error Message – java.lang.RuntimeException: data starting at XXX is in unknown format
I just wasted entire day on stupid error from ANT:
Build file:
C:\XXXXXX\build.xml
init:
starteam:
rubicon:
lib_selection:
build_td_manifest:
compile:
dist_no_test:
BUILD FAILED
C:\z\qc-project\qcdev\Server\TdCore\build.xml:139:
java.lang.RuntimeException: data starting at 14600 is in unknown format
Finally I found the simple solution – just run ‘clean’ target from the ANT file and run the main target again. So simple, so frustrating.