The Thunar Archive Plugin allows you to create and extract archive files using the file context menus in the Thunar file manager. For example, to create a new archive, select the files and folders you want to add to the archive, right-click on one of the selected files and select Create Archive... from the context menu. This will open the dialog shown below which allows you to specify the filename and type, target location and Other Options (if supported by the selected file type).

Create Archive Compress Dialog

Likewise you can easily extract archive files using the context menu. Just select the archive file you want to extract, right-click to open the context menu and select Extract Here.

Extract Archive

The files from the selected archive will be extracted to the current folder. If you select Extract To… instead, you will be prompted to specify the target location.

The Thunar Archive Plugin - since version 0.2.0 - provides a generic scripting interface for archive managers, so basically every archive manager that supports the required command-line switches (or an equivalent D-Bus interface) can be used with Thunar. See the README file in the source distribution for further details about the process of adding a new archive manager.

The standard MIME association mechanism is used to determine the preferred archive manager for the Create Archive…, Extract Here and Extract To… actions. However the plugin may not always be able to detect the appropriate archive manager for a certain task. In this case, the user will need to manually select the preferred archive manager from a list of possible applications.

The Thunar Archive Plugin currently includes support for Xarchiver, File Roller and Ark, but support for other archive managers can easily added by installing a .tap wrapper script in addition to the .desktop file for that application (see the README file in the source tarball).

You will need thunar at least to install thunar-archive-plugin.

Source tarballs and binary packages of the latest stable release 0.2.4 (and earlier releases) are available from the Xfce Goodies download page on BerliOS.

http://svn.xfce.org/svn/goodies/thunar-archiver-plugin/

svn co http://svn.xfce.org/svn/goodies/thunar-archive-plugin/trunk thunar-archive-plugin

For Thunar to be able to find the Thunar Archiver Plugin both have to be install with the same prefix. To ensure this run the following command to build from tarball:

./configure --prefix=$(pkg-config --variable prefix thunarx-1)

For source build from the goodies repository run the following:

./autogen.sh --prefix=$(pkg-config --variable prefix thunarx-1)

Afterwards one of these commands the source is ready to be build and installed. For install root access might be necessary.

make && make install

Bugs should be reported to the Xfce bug tracking system (product Thunar Plugins, component thunar-archive-plugin). You will need to create an account for yourself.