Archive extracting with Nautilus in Zorin 18

I'd like to find out what processes are triggered when you double-click an archive file, such as a tar.gz file, in the Nautilus file manager.

Since Zorin 18 Core, Nautilus has been the default application for such archive files, rather than the file-roller in Zorin 17 Core.

Since, unfortunately, no one has been able to answer this for me so far, I'd like to start a separate thread here specifically about this question.

Is there a way to figure this out without looking at Nautilus's source code?

I tried using htop and top -d 0.5, but they display so much information, and I don't know how to use them, so I couldn't get anywhere with them.

For nautilus, the gapplication.service was shown, but that didn't help.

I'm interested in finding out if nautilus calls file-roller in background or uses the tar tool or another one and how to do that.

Is there a way to monitor and list only the processes associated with Nautilus?

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Looking into this on the web, I found:

What these point to is that The current Nautilus File Manager does have integrated and basic compression and extraction functionality. But it is basic.
So, for a simple .tar extraction, it no longer needs to call on File Roller.
But for Complex tasks, it must still rely on File Roller and I think in the second link, a user mentions setting it to default to File Roller only due to this.

The exact process Nautilus uses integrated, I am less sure about. When it is integrated, doing a backwards trace is a lot harder.

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I can't find practically any information on what gnome-autoar actually does or how the feature - which is now integrated into Nautilus - works exactly.

Most users who switch back to file-roller do so not because the built-in archive handler fails to extract the archives, but because they want more control over the files to be extracted, for example, opening them first, specifying the save location, or extracting only certain files.

That's why I made 2 extensions to control what I do with archives

:clamp: Archive Browser | nautilus-archive-browser | Browse, extract and create archives|
:package: Extract Here | nautilus-extract-here | Fast extraction (7z, rar, zip…) with multi-volume & password|

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I also think that is why I prefer PCLOS Debian which uses Ark. As well as offering where to Extract to it also offers the option to create the extraction into its own folder in the same location as the archive.

You can still use file-roller in Zorin 18 or set it as default application, if you like.
Then you have more control.

You mentioned yesterday that Zorin uses file-roller, so I decided to create a separate thread to this topic. I’m not entirely sure whether file-roller still being called in the background or not. By default, file-roller is no longer the first program to handle this task - Nautilus is now responsible. However, I’m not sure who it delegates the task to, since gnome-autoar was already available in Zorin 17. So far, I haven't found an answer to this question.

But that uses an older Gnome Version. And since then the Gnome Dev's can have enabled it or changed it to default. So, the actual Archive Manager isn't running.