Working with CAB file on Linux

A cabinet (.cab) file is a library of compressed files stored as a single file. Cabinet files are used to organize installation files that are copied to the user's system. A large compressed file can be spread over several .cab files. If you're using Windows XP or Windows Vista, then your operating system has built-in support for opening Cab files. They are described as "Cabinet files." Just double-click on a Cab file and it will open in Explorer, just like a folder

Linux does not include support for CAB files by default. To add the support we need to install the cabextract.

cabextract is Free Software for extracting Microsoft cabinet files, also called .CAB files, on UNIX or UNIX-like systems. cabextract is distributed under the GPL license. It is based on the portable LGPL libmspack library. cabextract supports all special features and all compression formats of Microsoft cabinet files.

Installation:
To install the RPM, use the command rpm -ivh cabextract-1.2-1.i386.rpm.
To install from the source code tarball:

$ gzip -cd < cabextract-1.2.tar.gz | tar xf -
$ cd cabextract-1.2
$ ./configure
$ make
# make install

Ubuntu user can install cabextract using following command:

sudo apt-get install cabextract

Using cabextract:
Enter man cabextract to read the cabextract manual page. Also, running the cabextract command with the --help option gives a brief summary of usage

A simple example of extracting the cab file using cabextract:

$ cabextract test.cab