How do you view the contents of a .CAB file?

I'll trying to migrate away from Simply Accounting and need to somehow extract the contents of a Windows CAB file which is what Simply uses for backups.

What is the best way to open a CAB file on Ubuntu?

Solution 1:

Install the package cabextract: sudo apt-get install cabextract

From the command line, you can now do cabextract file.cab

You can also configure the Archive Manager GUI to open cab files once cabextract is installed.

Double click on the cab file. You will be told that it can't be displayed, but that not actually true. Press Select Application.

Select Archive Manager from the "Open With" dialog and check the "Remember this application" box.

Now you can handle cab files like zip or rar files. You can use the "Extract here" right click option or double click to open in Archive Manager.

Solution 2:

I had to install and use "unshield" to extract the contents of some cab files which were apparently "protected"...

kimberly@kimberly-desktop:~/Downloads/M12PlusV4302World$ cabextract -l *.cab | grep -i \.fw
data1.cab: WARNING; found InstallShield header. This is probably an InstallShield file. Use unshield (from the unshield package) to unpack it.
data1.cab: no valid cabinets found


root@kimberly-desktop:/usr/share/sane/gt68xx# apt-get install unshield
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required:
  libexiv2-10
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
  libunshield0
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libunshield0 unshield
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 28.9kB of archives.
After this operation, 156kB of additional disk space will be used.
...


kimberly@kimberly-desktop:~/Downloads/M12PlusV4302World$ unshield -d temp x *.cab
Cabinet: data1.cab
  extracting: temp/_Support_Spanish_String_Tables/StringTable-000a-Spanish.ips
  extracting: temp/Twain-P/TWAIN_32.RDL
  extracting: temp/Twain-P/Ds.chm
  extracting: temp/AM32-E/SCANRes.dll
  extracting: temp/AM32-E/StartRes.dll
  extracting: temp/AM32-E/Language.ini
  extracting: temp/_Support_English_Files/_IsRes.dll
...