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How do I open a CAB file on Mac OS X?

Thilo
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4 Answers4

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The Unarchiver supports them too.

Davide Gualano
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  • Thanks. I prefer that one over StuffIt. It is open source and does not ask for an admin password to install. – Thilo Dec 09 '09 at 11:32
  • You can check what gets installed (check out Pacifist), but likely the password is needed only because of the location of the install. – Jeremy L Dec 09 '09 at 11:52
  • @Nerdling: Probably. I really wished the standard installers offered a way to install just into the current user account, rather than system-wide. – Thilo Dec 10 '09 at 00:55
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In my case, neither The Unarchiver or cabextract were able to extract the .cab file, but the latter pointed me to unshield (https://github.com/twogood/unshield), which unpacked the file successfully.

Both cabextract and unshield are available in Homebrew (brew install unshield).

The syntax to unpack a file named data.cab with unshield is:

unshield x data.cab
divieira
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    Thanks, this is a nice tool to know about. Tested this with a `.cab` that was embedded in an MSI and unfortunately neither this nor any of the other solutions worked (the utility states it's not an Installshield cabinet file, which is correct it's not) :) – tresf Apr 13 '22 at 16:01
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The Unarchiver failed to open my particular CAB file ("error decrunching"), so I tried another pretty open-source app, called keka, which could do it.

There is also a cross-platform command-line tool that works: cabextract.

Thilo
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2

You may use the freeware StuffIt Expander 2010.
It supports over 30 archive file formats, including CAB.

harrymc
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