

It’s because of the old notion of “be generous in what you accept and strict in what you send”. I think the error is something about adding more parent directories so that part of your zip file will be extracted above the selected directory. Not all implementations of zip support this “feature”.
There are also all kinds of stupid ancient features in tar and zip from a time when hard drives were measured in megabytes or less. The latest episode of the open source security podcast talks about it.


This is sadly not easily generalizable, since a lot of people still use legacy operating systems with filesystems like NTFS, which as far as I know is not COW.