Ark 15.08.1 was released as part of KDE Applications yesterday. This release contains a handful of bugfixes, including a fix for a long-standing, highly-voted bug. The bug was first reported in 2009 and had 738 votes in bugzilla.

The bug caused drag’n’drop extraction for multiple selected archive entries to not function properly. When selecting multiple entries in an archive and dragging them to e.g. Dolphin for quick extraction, the selection would previously be undone and only the single entry under the mouse cursor would be extracted. This is now fixed so that all selected entries are extracted. Any dragged files are simply extracted without path, while for dragged folders any subfolders/files beneath them are also extracted. This is comparable to how most file archiving software works.

NB: Currently, for zip, rar and 7z archives, the selected entries are extracted with full path, but this will be fixed in a subsequent release.

Of other changes in this release, there was a fix for extracting rar archives when using unrar version 5 (bug 349131). If one or more of the destination files already existed, Ark would stall and the extraction process would never complete. This was caused by Ark only supporting the overwrite prompt of unrar version 3 and 4.

Also, the mime-type detection when opening archives was made more robust, so archives with a wrong filename extension should now be opened correctly by Ark (bugs 101170 and 265971).

Enjoy the release and look out for a great release in December with several new features 🙂

Thanks to Elvis Angelaccio and Raphael Kubo da Costa for reviewing the code changes.