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There are some (un)archivers that ignore Windows special wildcard handling concerning *.* and take the pattern literally, i.e they do not treat *.* as * as windows does but match *.* only to a name containing an actual dot character. The most prominent archiver doing this being 7-Zip (I am speaking about the program here, not the plugin). With these (un)archivers, leaving the default file pattern may lead unexpectedly to incomplete extraction of an archive. Any file without an extension and possibly entire folder trees within the archive are not matched and therefore not extracted by these programs unless you change the file pattern yourself.

Since Windows itself, and any other program I am aware of, matches that * pattern against all files, thus operate as expected when you specify a pattern of * rather than *.*, I hereby propose to change the default pattern in that AS dialog from *.* to *
Alternatively you could add a field to specify the default pattern in the configuration of 'Unpackers in Unpack Dialog Box', but I don't think the additional flexibility this would bring above the proposal above is really needed.

Another thing concerning file masks, though, is the fact that not all (un)archivers support a list file as parameter. Please add a variable to use as a parameter in the Arguments field, resolving to the file mask as entered in the dialog (something like $(FileMask) )

Its more a question for developers of 7zip. Why should Salamader do workarounds for other program's bugs.

SelfMan wrote:Its more a question for developers of 7zip. Why should Salamader do workarounds for other program's bugs.

Because it takes virtually no effort and has no bad side effects.

And, I'd rather consider Windows's illogical behavior as a bug than the clean wildcard handling of 7-zip. On the other hand, I agree that Windows sets the rules and 7-zip chooses to ignore them.

*.* to match anything (everything) is a relict from the times where there were no long filenames and the name part could not contain a dot. It ought to have been abandoned with the introduction of long filenames.

If (Salamander's) default action is *.*, with that to mean "all files", then *.* should still mean "all files" regardless of how "all files" is implemented in a particular archiver.

So in the case of 7-zip, it should default to (displaying) "*" when selected.
Or if it were to display *.*, when using 7-zip, *.* is to infer "*".

BUT, it looks like *.* already acts as "*" in the case of 7-zip plugin.


(Heh. It seems the default unpack directory is the current directory. The (rare) times I use Unpack, I would typically put a "." <dot> in that space. Most typically I pack/unpack from a command line. Hard to break old habits .)


<While we're on archivers, I see ARJ has been updated, "offering improved support for 64-bit operating systems". About 7 years since I last updated ARJ .>