cabextract

cabextract [-ddir] [-f] [-Fpattern] [-eencoding] [-h] [-l] [-L] [-p] [-q] [-s] [-t] [-v] cabinet files ...

cabextract is a program that un-archives files in the Microsoft cabinet file format (.cab) or any binary file which contains an embedded cabinet file (frequently found in .exe files).

cabextract will extract all files from all cabinet files specified on the command line.

To extract a multi-part cabinet consisting of several files, only the first cabinet file needs to be given as an argument to cabextract as it will automatically look for the remaining files. To prevent cabextract from extracting cabinet files you did not specify, use the -s option.

A summary of options is included below.

-d dir

Extracts all files into the directory dir.

-f

Corrupted cabinet files will be 'fixed' to salvage whatever is possible from them. File entries with bad folders or names will be skipped rather than rejecting the entire cabinet file. Impossible file lengths will be truncated to extract as much as possible, including when you're missing later files in a cabinet set. Corrupted MSZIP blocks and failed block checksums will be ignored. Warnings will be printed if any of these conditions are met.

-F pattern

Only files with names that match the shell pattern pattern shall be listed, tested or extracted. On non-GNU systems, this match may be case-sensitive.

-e encoding

Specify the character encoding of filenames inside the cabinet files. This is only needed if you find cabinet files with garbled filenames; most software creates CAB files with either ASCII or UTF8 filenames. The list of supported encodings is given by the command "iconv -l".

-h

Prints a page of help and exits.

-l

Lists the contents of the given cabinet files, rather than extracting them.

-L

When extracting cabinet files, makes each extracted file's name lowercase.

-p

Files shall be extracted to standard output.

-q

When extracting cabinet files, suppresses all messages except errors and warnings.

-s

When testing, listing or extracting cabinets which span multiple files, only cabinet files given on the command line shall be used.

-t

Tests the integrity of the cabinet. Files are decompressed, but not written to disk or standard output. If the file successfully decompresses, the MD5 checksum of the file is printed.

-v

If given alone on the command line, prints the version of cabextract and exits. Given with a list of cabinet files, it will list the contents of the cabinet files.

This manual page was written by Stuart Caie <kyzer@cabextract.org.uk>, based on the one written by Eric Sharkey <sharkey@debian.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system.