Nautilus no longer asks where to extract files to

Applications
1

I’m not sure what changed (I’m not aware to have changed anything). Until today, when I downloaded a zip archive in firefox, I automatically got the dialog that asked me where to extract the content to. Now the content is automatically extracted to a folder in “Downloads” and a window with the Downloads directory is opened.

Is there any way to get the old behavior back?

Michael

2

Hi and welcome to the forum!

You need to go to Firefox’s settings page and select “Ask where to save” (or something like that).

3

I’m afraid this option does not exist. I only have “always ask”, “save” and “open” (and “open with”, but that’s set correctly: nautilus). It is nautilus’ behavior that has changed. When firefox opens the file with nautilus, nautilus no longer asks where to extract the zip to but rather extracts it automatically in Downloads.

4

Ah, I get what you meant now, sorry, I misread your post.

AFAIK, this behaviour is a thing for several versions now. What distro are you on? And what GNOME version? Did you updated your distro to new major version or something?

5

On GNOME the default app for handling archive files is set to Nautilus. The default action when opening an archive in Nautilus is to extract it in its directory. The behavior you’re currently seeing. When you tell Firefox to open an archive file instead of save it to disk, Nautilus does that: extract the archive in its directory. This is how it has worked for the past few years.

I don’t know how the behavior on your system could have changed between yesterday and today, unless you did a major OS upgrade or changed file type associations (if maybe before you didn’t have Nautilus set as the default app and recently reset that, or for some archive formats you don’t have Nautilus set as the default app and for other archive formats you do and that’s why you see a different behavior).

I don’t think you can configure this behavior in GNOME or Nautilus. What you can do is right-click an archive file in Nautilus, choose Open With, then in the list of apps highlight File Roller (Archive Manager) and at the bottom of the dialog enable “Always use for this file type” option then click Open. From now on archive files of the same type would be opened in File Roller. The top left “Extract…” button in File Roller asks you where to extract the archive, what you want.

I didn’t want to go through that for every archive type that Nautilus can handle so I did it in one go with the below command. This takes all archive types that Nautilus is associated with and re-assigns them all to File Roller.

grep '^MimeType=' /usr/share/applications/org.gnome.Nautilus.desktop | cut -d'=' -f2 | tr ';' $'\n' | grep -v 'inode/directory' | xargs xdg-mime default org.gnome.FileRoller.desktop
6

Thank you very much for the exhaustive explanation. I hadn’t been aware that there are two applications: nautilus and file roller. I always thought that all file handling is integrated in nautilus – that’s the drawback of a well integrated unified GUI, you don’t notice the change of application.

I don’t know what changed my configuration but “What you can do is right-click an archive file in Nautilus, choose Open With, then in the list of apps highlight File Roller (Archive Manager) and at the bottom of the dialog enable “Always use for this file type” option then click Open.” fixed it. “Open” in firefox now invokes file roller as it did before (and now I’m aware of it).

Thanks!