I have been professionally using Linux desktop environments for the last 10 years. They all have a number of deficiencies that get in the way of productivity. The lack of a decent GUI archive extraction helper, integrated with the graphical file manager, is just one tiny aspect.
On a fresh Windows system one of the first applications I typically install is 7zip. It adds convenient entries to the context menu of archive files. For example, it allows for selecting multiple archive files at once, offering a 7-Zip - Extract To "*\"
in the context menu (found an example screenshot here). That will extract each selected archive file into an individual sub-directory (with the sub-directory’s name being the base name of the archive file w/o file extension). Quite useful!
I have looked a couple of times over the years, but I never found a similar thing for a modern Gnome desktop environment. Let me know if you know of a reliable solution that is well-integrated with one of the popular graphical file managers such as Thunar.
The same can of course be achieved from the terminal. What follows is the one-liner I have been using for the past couple of years. I usually look it up from my shell command history:
find -name '*.zip' -exec sh -c 'unzip -d "${1%.*}" "$1"' _ {} \;
This extracts all zip files in the current directory into individual sub-directories.
If you do not want to extract all zip files in the current directory but only a selection thereof then adjust the command (well, this is where a GUI-based solution would actually be quite handy, no?).
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