discrepancy between cmdline and nautilus "compress" on a test folder

[Sandeep]

Binary package hint: file-roller

sks@menz: dpkg-query -W file-roller
file-roller 2.28.1-0ubuntu1

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 9.10
Release: 9.10
Codename: karmic

The files are from a game save in Crossover/wine. Right-click compress -> tar.bz2 throws a permission denied error.
As is obvious (since I attached it), 'tar jcvf bug.tar.bz2 11" works fine.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please answer these questions:

 * Is this reproducible?
 * If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug?

 This will help us to find and resolve the problem.

[Sandeep (sandys-gmail)]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Unpack the attached bug.tar.bz2 anywhere on your computer. It will result in a folder "11". You may use any method for decompressing that you prefer (commandline or GUI)

2. Right-click on the folder "11" and select "Compress"

3. Give any filename (say "new") and select extension "tar.bz2". Choose any destination folder in your home.

4. An error pops up
  "An error occurred while adding files to the archive"
          "permission denied"

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

I cannot confirm, that works fine for me with both command line and file-roller

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Is this still an issue with Lucid?

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to New. Thanks again!.

[tomazzi (tomazzi-wp)]

Well, I have this problem since... I even don't remember... and that's true - only wine folders (prefixes) are affected. It was/is not very annoying but rather strange. Today I've found some time to investigate this behaviour of nautilus/file-roller and it looks like I've found the source of this problem.
I've checked permissions of (sub)folders and files and tested every particular folder if it can be compressed with RightMouseClick -> and ONLY SOME OF THEM causes file-roller to stop with "permission denied" message.

Direct cause is, that wine creates links to "dosdevices", "My documents" "My movies" ... and so on, just like windoze. Usually Z: drive is linked to /root and in $WINEPREFIX/drive_c/users/<username>/ other critical links are placed. That means if someone wants to compress whole $WINEPREFIX directory, or just drive "C:" there is high chance to get permissions violation. Solution is to check every link in every folder and change it to safe location or just reove it. Doing so I was able to compress whole WINEPREFIX without error.

Conclusion: File-Roller follows links during creating list of files, and can cause permissions violation.
Suggested solution: Not only wine folders can contain links -> it would be nice to have option like "Do not follow links" in FileRoller window.

[Robert Roth (evfool)]

I have found a relevant upstream bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=604247 about having some options when archiving symbolic links.