I have finally made progress with xarchiver and encryption.

For better or worse, the process of adding a password to protect a compressed file using xarchiver is not too at all intuitive.

To wit:

If you open PCManFM, point to select a file and right-click/select 'Compress ...' and save it, you get exactly that.
A compressed file.

/rant start
Now ...
Do you want an extra serving of password with that?
Forget it, not on the menu.
/rant end

You have to do it the proper way:

Step 1.
Open up the xarchiver application
Applications -> Accesories -> xarchiver
Archive -> New

Step 2.
Add a name, a location to save to and and hit 'Create'
You now you have an empty *.zip file* with a name and the xarchiver UI open. 
* this provided you have chosen the default compression file type as zip in Preferences -> Preferred archive format.

Step 3.
Now ...
Action -> Add gets you the 'Add files' window where in the 'Selection' tab you can choose a file and whether to store full paths or not.

Right next to it is the 'Options' tab with the 'Actions' | 'Compression' | 'Encryption Options'.

The rest is straightforward.

Cannot imagine why pointing to select a file in PCManFM and right-clicking/selecting 'Compress ...' does not take you directly Step 3.
Maybe it is a PacManFM thing?

Right ...

The answer is yes.
Pity that finding out how it had to be done proved to be an ordeal worthy of a much better cause.

But make no mistake, this may probably be the fastest/lightest and most versatile archiving utility for Linux.
It is mature and still works a wonder, which is why I have insisted on using it.

Problem solved.

Best,

A.

Seems I have made some progress ...

See this bug report against PCManFM from long ago, aparently overlooked:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo … bug=932461
ie: File -> Compress would not work in PCManFM 1.3.1-1

So I followed the workaround instructions and edited /usr/share/libfm/archivers.list:

[xarchiver]
# create=xarchiver --add-to %F       # create command is wrong
create=xarchiver --compress %F
extract=xarchiver --extract %F
extract_to=xarchiver --extract-to %d %F

Now compress works and I can choose from a boatload of file types.
Talk about options.  8^°

But still no joy with Action -> Enter password, which remains greyed out.
Cannot find any information on that.

Maybe I would have to see if there is a PCManFM backport for beowulf?

Best,

A.

I have not looked at it, but I was looking for a front end to the applications I have installed.

Thanks for your input.

Best,

A.

Ahh ...

I had a look but found more or less the same.
Not at all convinced for the same reason.
ie: bloat

xarchiver is very fast, very lean and still works.
Not many abandoned applications can say the same.
eg: WiCD

I then came across ib/xarchiver:

Seems it is a ... continuation of the Xfce master branch. 
But not a fork? Rather confusing, at least for me.

https://www.linuxlinks.com/xarchiver-fr … ing-tools/
https://github.com/ib/xarchiver#readme

There is no .deb package so has to be compiled, something 'ordinary' Dev1ers such as I will have to get used to soon enough.

I'd appreciate it if you could have a look and let me know what you think.

Thanks in advance.

Best,

A.

Any suggestions for a small footprint front end like xarchiver?

I was about to ask you the same thing. So I asked the Duck instead, and top choices seem to be PeaZip (not in debian/devuan) or Engrampa.

On my full-desktop xfce system, engrampa wants to add 15mb and file-roller wants to add 21. Ark wants to add 200mb, but that's because it needs a lot of qt stuff that isn't installed. On my minimal lxqt system, ark wants 90mb, lxqt-archiver wants 7mb, xarchiver wants 1.7mb.

Yes.

What I meant was encryption or password.
Sorry if I expressed myself incorrectly.

https://xarchiver.sourceforge.net/doc/ch04s02.html

For the time being, I made a *.pdf in Acrobat 7 (XPSP3 VM) with a strong password.

Edit:

It would seem that xarchiver is (and has been) definitely abandoned for the longest while.

There are open bugs from 2008 and then there is this:

https://sourceforge.net/p/xarchiver/bugs/97/#e700

Giuseppe Torelli is the author.
https://xarchiver.sourceforge.net/

Any suggestions for a small footprint front end like xarchiver?

Thanks in advance.

Best,

A.

I am attempting to use xarchiver 0.5.4.14 to create an encrypted / password protected file containing a QR image but the application has no option for doing that, no matter what file extension I chose.

From what I can see, all dependencies are met.

I'd appreciate any pointers.

Thanks in advance.

Best,

A.