Hello,
When i try to open my archive with Ark it said:“The archive is empty or Ark could not open its content.”
If i remember right, i created this archive few years ago under Windows with winrar and compressed it to save space.
What other tools can i use to open this file?
I take it’s a RAR archive? Do you have unrar installed?
Arc uses the utilites in background to access the contents.
So in this case you need to have some utility installed that can decompress RAR files.
IIRC, that would be rar/unrar package.
That sounds good, can i just install “unrar” from the official repos and Arc (GUI) will use it automatically?
That would mean it is now doulby compressed - not that this would actually save much space, if any.
What it likely means is that the format is a .rar file that is now encapsulated in another archive format.
find out with:
file your_archive
to see what kind of archive it is - and uncompress/unpack that
then uncompress/unpack what was in it once more …
RAR archive data, flags: EncryptedBlockHeader
No idea about “automatically”, but if it doesn’t, you could/should be able to use:
$ unrar e filename.rar
or:
$ unrar x filename.rar
…if you want the full path to be restored. However, if it was compressed under that Redmond system, the path might not be possible to restore, in which case it will probably spit back an error message.
Personally, I use only this method and almost never ark. Same for 7za, handling 7zip and zip archives.
You might have the ex() function in your .bashrc file. At the prompt:
$ ex
'' cannot be extracted via ex()
I guess you’d have to be running bash, not everybody does. But that zsh was the first thing I changed. It and I are not on speaking terms. Perhaps there is something similar in there, if that’s what you use.
The ex() function can handle most archives:
130 *.tar.bz2) tar xjf $1 ;;
131 *.tar.gz) tar xzf $1 ;;
132 *.bz2) bunzip2 $1 ;;
133 *.rar) unrar x $1 ;;
134 *.gz) gunzip $1 ;;
135 *.tar) tar xf $1 ;;
136 *.tbz2) tar xjf $1 ;;
137 *.tgz) tar xzf $1 ;;
138 *.zip) unzip $1 ;;
139 *.Z) uncompress $1;;
140 *.7z) 7z x $1 ;;
Never mind the line numbers, those are from nano.
Editing this because I now found out about the encryption. You can, if you have used the same password for a bunch of RAR files, use the Terminal to swiftly (well, compared to one at a time) do something like:
$ for f in *.rar; do unrar e "$f" -p"my long and complicated password"; done
If you get some error from your shell, read the docs. This was typed from memory and no testing was performed. 8)
unrar may let you unpack it - but it seems to be encrypted - you used a password to protect it when you created it
so it seems
Not sure whether the unrar utility can deal with that
I simply don’t know. 
Yes, it does. It will ask you for the password when you use unrar x
Thats really strange with ark, i gave in a few times the wrong password and it showed in ark that i have the incorrect password… and with the right password the message changed to: The archive is empty or Ark could not open its content. as i posted in the Topic… but with unrar installed the same password showed up as incorrect password now, in ark.
Yes because one is the frontend (GUI) and the other is the backend (util) 
There are two layers now if you compressed it twice.
Both may be encrypted, separately.
ARK may not be the best way to try and open/unpack it.
If
unrar x your_archive
tells you “wrong password” I would tend to believe it.
Also (since you said this was years ago):
Strong encryption capabilities. Older versions of the file format used a proprietary algorithm; newer versions use the AES encryption algorithm, a block cipher adopted as an encryption standard by the U.S. government. The only known ways to recover an encrypted file are via dictionary or brute force attacks. In newer versions, password protection can optionally protect filenames too, so that the filenames contained within the archive will not be displayed without the right password.
… the proprietary algorithm may foil your efforts …
This also dont work with my password.
Not sure if this is a misunderstanding here:
it’s not your user account password that is needed
but the password you used back then to secure the archive when you created it.
All I can say is what I already said in my previous post.
If it where about me, I would not be very sure that I remembered the password I may have used years ago.
Good on you if you have a better memory than me. 
Then there is the possibility that an old version of winrar was used (proprietary algorithm) - I simply don’t know whether the current unrar utility can decrypt that.
Best bet would probably be to take it to a windows installation from around that time - or use an old version of winrar - to try and unpack it.
I think that winrar is working well under wine … that would be another possibility.
Everything works now, it was a password error thanks everyone for the help.
I also could open the archive with Ark.
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