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).

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