Title sums it up.

I upgraded from Jessie to Stretch recently and I have this problem now.

I have two file managers, PCManFM (default) and SpaceFM.

SpaceFM doesn't show rar files with the proper icon. PCManFM does. Double-clicking a rar archiver in either launches Xarchiver, but it shows an empty archive.

I can also try the Archive > Open option in the top bar menu, and that will fail, too.

There is also another menu entry, Action > Cmd-line output. That one shows the content of the archive, but that doesn't solve my problem.

The fact that SpaceFM doesn't show rar files with the proper icon tells me that some part of the system knows that there is something wrong with rar files, but what is it?

Any ideas?

let's concentrate on xarchiver.
no error messages?
try starting from commandline and repeat.
rar installed?

I can't speak for Debian and Xarchiver, but with CentOS and File Roller, rar files need to be handled from the command line with unrar. You probably haven't got that installed and it's probably in the non-free repository.

sorry, unrar.

it works for me on archlinux:

I have unrar installed, it works as expected on command line, and it used to work very well when invoked from either file manager in Debian Jessie. The problem began when I moved to Debian Stretch.

I tried launching Xarchiver from the command line and opening a rar archive, and it fails and produces no output. Mystery.

under preferences, please check "store archiver output" and try again, you should be able to see the output with some other menu entry.

That option is/was checked already.

I'm getting something similar in Mint 17,3, all of a sudden about 6 (correction)*months* ago, I was raring usenet packs in caja, with a right click -> Compress, i'd select 15mb parts like I should press Ok, a randomly named folder would appear, if I looked in it, the file.rar file.r01, file.r02, file.r03" and then the folder deletes itself and there's no archiver. I can open them in Archive Manager and the similar File-Roller and extract them from there, it took me along time because I never imagined using a compression program's gui so much like that.

Nobody on the mint forums helped me since 2 years, I made one thread a year about this issue, silence, so I thought I would try a non web 2.0 friendly site

Thanks for your time if you read this and have a solution.

I have used unrar in terminal and the result is the same, I can only get it done in one of the programs calling themselves Archive Managers, that took me a long time to figure out as nobody on Mint's forum would help and I asked elsewhere, tried many things myself, have been told to install peazip, that it would let me do it, well for some reason peazip makes my AMDFX-8350 that is well cooled, only 1 fan out of 6 needs replacement, although it's the stock fan that came with it, the 8 cores in it get so hot, the temperature panel gets into the red and my computer shuts down (BIOS safety measure that shuts it down past 85c or is it 90c...I don't know, I never get the time to see, and when this happen, I need to turn off the power supply, wait 10 minutes and start it over because the power supply will be burning hot.

does it work from command line?
with unrar?
is there a password or anything else non-standard?
maybe just show us the output, use a --verbose switch if possible.

Yes, unrar works on command line.
None of these archives is password protected.
There is no output, as described previously in this thread. Xarchiver has no --verbose option. I believe unrar does, but there is nothing wrong with unrar. The problem is in Xarchiver. Xarchiver displays empty rar archives:

$ sudo apt-get install p7zip-rar

According to apt-file the only file of consequence is /usr/lib/p7zip/Codecs/Rar.so

Using strace on the thing that's failing can help ID what it's looking for and missing. Probably that thing IMO. I haven't dealt in rar for a while but probably something like:

$ 7z x file.rar

to extract the contents. The unrar thing is a different package and not the default assumption by many things these days. Just an assumption as I haven't really dealt in that file type for a good long while.

I can do with a small folder and give you the verbose, but I gave you the information you asked of me in further posts by editing the post, let's see :

hmm, i tried first without verbose, and hmm all of a sudden it worked, I guess removing all compression and uncompression programs worked. I got a much larger issue on my hands right now, I buy a 2tb external drive that would help me empty a few partitions on a better drive than my current linux partition is on (it's on one of the first ever sata drives, a WD 200gb sata 1.5gb/s and it's doing strange things I can only see as the partition on that old drive, there's 2, and it's on sda2 because at the, I'm running Linux Mint 17 since it came out as it is LTS, updates until beginning of summer 2019, so I've had to install 17.1, 17.2, 17.3 with time, I don't know how long but that's where grub is also..., I didn't have the space on any of my 2 1tb other internal drives and back then sole 500gb external which was usb 2.0 .At first I did what I was always do, use Disks and create an .img of a partition on a much larger drive, which was there, with a lot of data i had moved there, but again, my desktop got too hot and shutdown after 5 minutes of that, so I look for doing it through dd, but I must have used the wrong program because dd removed was used to be there entirely, stuff that was on an old 750 external that took pretty long to move despite the usb 3.0
Anyway, i'm doing testdisk, since I haven't one anything else since that dd command that looked like it made sense, but I should have listened to my own sense, the command not having a file.img somewhere in it...but that's for another thread...i tried gparted data rescue, but not from a live session, so it was going to be very slow, so now it,s testdisk, it's very slow but at least I can know where it is in the process. Sorry, that's for another thread in case I have problems. I'm starting to think my power supply is slowly dying, but geez, it should be still on warranty, I bought this mobo, cpu and power supply at the same time 2 years 1/2 ago. And I went with the highest quality 540w power supply they had, could have ordered a 600w or even more but I didn't feel like waiting. Anyway, like I said, if testdisk doesn't find the previous partition, i'm not so much in trouble, it didn't delete anything that is not on my VPS, thankfully, but had I chosen my other external 3.0 drive, it's "only 1tb" but it has half of my music collection, plus a backup of what music is on an internal drive...would've been panic land and I am prescribed something close to valium to take as needed, I think many of us even years of exp with linux we can relate to that feeling of anger/frustration.

Have a good day,as for now it seems rar works just fine in the command line since I did what I did.

To us who still use Usenet binaries, it still matters a lot, rar and par files are our bread and water I have entire backups of hard drives uploaded to usenet, of course the very large rar collection is password protected, but that's a cheap 5.99 a month for unlimited storage plus, all the neat things one can find there without alerting the torrent bots.

Hello there,
I had the same problem lucmove described.
I've solved installing the package unrar-free, not "unrar".
Now XArchiever works just fine with rar files.
Hope it helps!
Mark