Comment 17 for bug 371167

This bug is not quite a duplicate, at least not for 7zip. In reply to comment #7, installing p7zip-full does not fully fix the problem. It does, however, change the behaviour of file-roller. Without p7zip-full, file-roller uses unzip and cannot extract files with special characters in their name. With p7zip-full installed, it obviously uses 7z and still shows weird characters in most cases, but they can be extracted. It does also not solve the problem the other way round (opening archives on windows which were created with file-roller), but changes behaviour here too.

"In most cases" means it also depends on the windows packer used. I did some cross-tests and found out really weird behaviour. Files created with Filzip work, files created with Winzip 14 or 7zip for Windows (sic!) do not. Interestingly enough, this does not work the other way round, i.e. Filzip for Windows cannot handle Archives correctly created with p7zip for Linux. Also, 7zip for Win can handle file-roller archives created with info-zip, but not those created with p7zip. 7zip for Win also cannot handle Filzip archives, but the other way round works. p7zip archives can be handled by Winzip 14, but again not the other way round.

Summary: There is currently no pair of Windows<->Linux programs I know of which can handle special characters in archives created by the other program. The real blocker is file-roller not being able top open/extract those files at all, which can be solved by installing p7zip-full. All other programs can open these files, though with a cluttered filename. Anyway, this needs to be fixed with some kind of encoding detection/guessing.