About

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, just right click on 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 a dialog, which prompts you to enter the name of the archive file and the location where to store the created file to.

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.

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

The Thunar Archive Plugin - since 0.2.0 - provides a generic scripting interface for archive managers, so basicly 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. Then 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 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).

Installation

Requirements

You will need atleast the following software packages in order to install and use the Thunar Archive Plugin:

• Thunar File Manager

Stable releases

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

Getting the source from SVN

The Thunar Archive Plugin - just like the other Xfce Goodies - is available from the Xfce Goodies SVN repository, which means that you will need to install a Subversion client in order to be able to check out from the SVN repository (you can use the web interface for browsing the repository).

You can download the latest version of thunar-archive-plugin using the following command:

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

This will create a new directory thunar-archive-plugin in the current path, which contains the latest version from the repository.

Building and installing

If you downloaded a release tarball, you can simply run

./configure --prefix=/usr/local
          

now. The prefix must be the same prefix where Thunar is installed. You can find out the prefix using the following command:

pkg-config --variable prefix thunarx-1
          

Else if you use a SVN snapshot, you need to run

sh autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local
          

instead, because the automatically generated files are not included in the repository.

If the configure script complains about missing thunarx-1 package and you are using a binary package for Thunar, be sure to install the appropriate -devel package (i.e. for Debian/Ubuntu it is libthunar-vfs-1-dev). Next, you continue with

make
make install
          

where the install step must be done with superuser privilegues. That's all, now you just need to restart Thunar in order to be able to use the plugin.

Reporting Bugs

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.

Related Links

• thunar-archive-plugin on GnomeFiles.org
• thunar-archive-plugin on SoftPedia.com