Cannot extract zip archive when filenames contain a \ character

[Fabio Bossi]

Binary package hint: file-roller

Some zip files (I suppose it also happens with other formats but I haven't tried yet) that can be downloaded from the Internet may contain files with the "\" character in their names instead of "/" in order to indicate that they are placed inside a directory. File-roller does not recognize this fact and interprets \ as the escape character. The result is a "caution: filename not matched" error when trying to extract the archive. A similar error occours with Ark in Kubuntu. The unzip command line tool instead outputs a warning but manages to extract the archive properly.

[Michele Mangili (mangilimic)]

Hi Fabio.

I suppose that this is a duplicate bug. Can you please give a look at bug number #294215 ? And tell me if that is the same issue.

Thank you.

[Michele Mangili (mangilimic)]

There it is:

bug #294215

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/294215

[Fabio Bossi (fabio-bossi-deactivatedaccount)]

It looks related, as it involves the handling of special characters. I don't know if it can be considered a duplicate though.

[Michele Mangili (mangilimic)]

Can you attach an example file, so that we can try to reproduce this bug?

Thank you

[Fabio Bossi (fabio-bossi-deactivatedaccount)]

Not right now. For the meantime, now that I think about it, this is not a duplicate as while the other bug is fixed this is obviously not, as my Ubuntu is completely updated.

[Fabio Bossi (fabio-bossi-deactivatedaccount)]

I've been able to create such a file file manually.

Of course we have ambiguity here, as the \ character could be both a directory separator or part of the filename. In all cases, the archive should at least extract.

[Michele Mangili (mangilimic)]

I couldn't extract that file using file-roller 2.24.1-0ubuntu2 (which is affected by bug #294215 ) but I was able to extract it with file-roller 2.25.2-0ubuntu1.
file-roller extracted a file with name "mydirectory\myfile" and it didn't create the directory "mydirectory" .

Which version of file-roller are you using?

I think that the example you have provided is a duplicate of bug #294215 . In fact the archive you have posted contains a file which filename is "mydirectory\myfile". So the filename contains a "\" (backslash) character. As you can read here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=559481 (this is the upstream report for #294215) special characters in filenames are "[]*?!^-\" and backslash is included. At the same time I suppose that the backslash character is not a directory separator when used in the filename. It must be a character which belongs to the name of a file and it doesn't represent a directory, although I don't know the zip file format, so I'm not sure.

I understand that your bug report pointed out that the character '\' could be used to represent a sub-directory in an archive (e.g. a .zip file) instead of using the character '/'.

We'd be grateful if you would then provide an archive in which the "\" character in the name of a file is used to represent that the file is placed inside a directory, so that we can reproduce this bug.

[Fabio Bossi (fabio-bossi-deactivatedaccount)]

I'm still using 2.24.1 on Ubuntu 8.10, but update manager says that there are no updates avaiable. As for the file, I need access to another machine which i don't have right now. I'll try as soon as possible.

[Michele Mangili (mangilimic)]

Fabio ha scritto:
> I'm still using 2.24.1 on Ubuntu 8.10, but update manager says that
> there are no updates avaiable.

At the moment, the new version of file-roller is not available for 8.10.
However you can download it from [1].

It is quite easy to install and it works great if you are using Ubuntu
8.10 .

Thank you.

[1] http://packages.ubuntu.com/jaunty/file-roller

[Fabio Bossi (fabio-bossi-deactivatedaccount)]

I've finally found a file that uses \ as a directory separator and shouldn't have any copyright issue.

The bug is not a problem for me as I can extract from command line, but I thought that new users may be pissed off if they encounter this issue. Please check if the file extracts with the latest file-roller.

[Michele Mangili (mangilimic)]

Thank you Fabio for your quick response.

I couldn't extract file MBTI.zip using file-roller 2.24.1-0ubuntu2, but I was able to extract it with file-roller 2.25.2-0ubuntu1.

file-roller 2.25.2-0ubuntu1 created the correct directory tree and put all the files in the right place!

Indeed I think that it is possible to mark this report with status "Fix Released".

Thanks for taking the time to make Ubuntu better!

[Narcis Garcia (narcisgarcia)]

Fileroller 2.26.1 in Xubuntu 9.04: I try to extract a .zip package containing subdirectory structure in the file names (as it shows Fileroller).

- If I extract it in a FAT volume, returns:
7-Zip 4.58 beta Copyright (c) 1999-2008 Igor Pavlov 2008-05-05
p7zip Version 4.58 (locale=ca_ES.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,1 CPU)

Processing archive: /mnt/fat32volume/mypackage

Extracting firstfile.xml
can not open output file /mnt/fat32volume/SUBDIR\FIRSTFILE.XML
can not open output file /mnt/fat32volume/SUBDIR\SECONDFILE.XML
...
...
...
Sub items Errors: 25

- If I extract it in Ext3 volume, extracts the files with names as "SUBDIR\FIRSTFILE.XML", "SUBDIR\SECONDFILE.XML", and without creating any subdirectory.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Could you reproduce that with Karmic Actiu? If so please open a new bug report about it, thanks.