Unifyl — a dual-pane file manager for macOS

Fix garbled filenames from ZIP files on a Mac

Updated 2026 · mojibake repair for Korean, Japanese and Chinese names

You extracted a ZIP from a colleague on Windows and got this:

Nothing is corrupt. Older Windows archivers store filenames in the system's legacy codepage — CP949 for Korean, Shift-JIS for Japanese, GBK for Chinese — while macOS reads filenames as UTF-8. The bytes are intact; they're just being decoded with the wrong table. The file contents are untouched.

Restoring the original names

Unifyl has a built-in encoding repair for exactly this. Select the garbled files and it detects which of CP949 / Shift-JIS / GBK the names were written in, shows you a preview of the restored names, and converts them in one pass. If anything looks wrong, ⌘Z undoes the whole batch.

1. Download Unifyl (free — this feature is in the free tier).
2. Navigate to the garbled files and select them.
3. Run Tools ▸ Encoding Conversion — the preview shows what each name will become.
4. Confirm. Wrong guess? ⌘Z restores everything.

Avoiding the problem next time

Don't extract with the macOS double-click. Open the ZIP inside Unifyl (Return enters the archive like a folder) and copy files out with F5 — its ZIP reader detects the name encoding correctly at extraction time, so the names come out right in the first place. Korean .alz archives work the same way — see opening ALZ files on a Mac.

Download Unifyl free