So, yesterday I had an interesting issue with a corrupt .war file which was producing all sorts of errors when I tried to extract it, for instance:

BUILD FAILED
java.lang.RuntimeException: data starting at 0 is in unknown format

When I manually extracted the war file, or did an inspection on it (using “unzip -T”), then it gave these errors:

error:  invalid compressed data to inflate

It turns out I was corrupting it by running a filter on it at an earlier stage in the build, a bit like this:

<copy todir=”${release.dir}/${app.name}/tomcat/” includeEmptyDirs=”false”>
<fileset dir=”${build.dir}/${app.name}/tomcat/”>
</fileset>
<filterset>
<filter token=”SERVERNAME” value=”${dest}” />
<filter token=”DBSERVER” value=”${db.server}” />
</filterset>
</copy>

So basically I had to make sure that the war file was copied separately, and then the other files (which i wanted to run the filter on) were copied afterwards. Interesting…