Engrampa won't extract or create zip or cbz archives

Support & Help Requests
#1

I’m having trouble with Engrampa on 16.04.
It won’t open or create a zip or cbz archive, giving an error: “An error occurred while adding files to the archive.”
I have everything installed (zip, p7zip-full etc).
Any ideas? Thanks!

#2

I had a similar problem. I don’t know if it was identical to yours, but I was told to install this. After installation, Engrampa started behaving itself with various archives it had previously complained about. So, i am guessing Engrampa must be able to make use of unrar:

sudo apt-get install unrar

As I said, I don’t know if it’s related to your problem, but it shouldn’t hurt to install it and see (unrar is used to process rar and zip files)

#3

Thanks, but I already had it installed. Anyway went ahead and removed it, still didn’t work, installed it again, still didn’t work. I can’t get what the problem really is, since I have everything that engrampa depends on installed and then some. And zip itself works file from the terminal, ie the zip binary works. But engrampa just can’t seem to be able to use it.

#4

This does indeed sound like there is something wrong with Engrampa. Are there any other Linux alternatives you could try out and see if they perform better? If they do, I would appreciate you listing them here as I may try them out myself

#5

I guess I could try file-roller and see? Engrampa is a fork of file-roller I think. I recently switched from Mint and was using Engrampa there, it had no problems with zip files though.

#6

I’ve literally just installed file-roller since my last post. I’ll let you know how it goes.

#7

Can you run Engrampa from the command line and see if you get a more verbose error message that way?
Cheers

#8

I’ve tried that but running engrampa from the command line only runs the GUI anyway, with the same error message.

#9

Engrampa is using 7zip as a backend for zip files. If you can add files with 7zip from the command line with something like 7z a Zipfile.zip file2add file2addtoo which would create a zip file called Zipfile.zip containing file2add and file2addtoo.

If that works you shouldn’t have any issue with Engrampa, File-Roller or Xarchiver (the xfce version) because they just call the command line anyway.

#10

Just checked 7z as well, it works from the command line. But engrampa doesn’t. This is really strange.

#11

RIGHT! I found out what the culprit was! It appears that engrampa won’t work with zip if compression-level is set to maximum, which is a setting I’ve been using for years without problem so I’m used to changing it first thing from dconf. I set it back to normal and now engrampa handles zips as well. Still, weird… :slight_smile: Thanks everyone for bearing with me through this, it was probably my fault, though I’m pretty sure I was able to zip files with maximum compression-level before.

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#12

@sunshinecorp: that’d make a fantastic bug - report

Cheers

#13

Yup. Done.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/engrampa/+bug/1580860

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#14

Excellent troubleshooting. Thanks for posting that solution… worked for me after months of frustration.

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#15

We have this fixed upstream now. I’ve added a patch to the mentioned bug report.
In case anyone needs the original commit, here it is:

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#16

So it’s been fixed in 17.10 some time ago, and now the fixed versions have also landed in 16.04 and 17.04.

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