Below is the email that I originally sent to Mr. Paolo Bacchilega, the maintainer for File Roller. I didn't realize that their email was either disabled or set to not receive emails from non-approved senders. I just used the address that I found on the man page since that's one of the first places that I checked for help. I'm now forwarding this matter to the general mailing list, I hope that this isn't an issue.
Hello Mr. Paolo Bacchilega,
My name is Dale, also known as the stoicfatman. I'm very sorry if this isn't the appropriate way to contact you, but I found your information on the man page for file-roller. I'm reaching out for assistance with trying to modify its' use in a specific context.
My question is, "how can the default behavior of file-roller be changed when using the context menu to extract files from an archive?". Specifically in the latest version of Ubuntu and Pop OS (I'm using Pop OS 21.04, GNOME 3.38.5, X11; fully updated) when the "Extract Here" option is selected from the context menu, the contents of the archive are automatically extracted to the same place in the directory as the archive, but within a new folder with the same name of the archive. Is there a setting that a user like myself could change so that when "Extract Here" is selected that the files within the archive are extracted without it creating a new folder?
Or, if this makes more sense, would there be a way for a user to add an additional option to the context menu so that users can quickly decide on fly whether to extract files to a new folder or directly? "Extract Here" could keep its' current functionality, but a second option like "Extract Here Directly" could extract the files without creating a new folder.
I've contacted multiple people about this already, they all exist between the regular user and distro support level. I've received various responses, but no one has been certain on what should be done. The best response I got was from a Pop OS developer that alerted me to the gsettings command.
So I ran:
gsettings get org.gnome.FileRoller.Dialogs.Extract recreate-folders
and the value returned as "true".
so then I changed the value to false via:
gsettings set org.gnome.FileRoller.Dialogs.Extract recreate-folders false
After changing it to false, I confirmed that the setting took place by running the original argument again:
gsettings get org.gnome.FileRoller.Dialogs.Extract recreate-folders
and confirmed that it returned "false" as its' value.
After doing this, extracting archives still has the same result. This persists even after rebooting. If I need to manually reset something or flush some cache then I'm completely unaware of it. The other options given to me was to just manually open the archive program and pull files out that way or to install a different program. While those work, none are actually changing the behavior for the context menu. I also didn't see a way to change this behavior via the gui gnome settings app, which may not be the correct name, but it's for this window in Pop OS and Ubuntu:
Any help or guidance that you could provide would be greatly appreciated. I'm sorry if this wasn't the appropriate way to follow-up on this. I also found a mailing list, desktop-devel-list, that's listed on
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/FileRoller. If that's how you would prefer for me to reach out in the future or even now then I'll do so. I wanted to make the least amount of noise while seeking help with this matter.
Thanks again in advance for your time.
