Extracting .CAB files in Linux

First of all, what is .cab files?

From Wikipedia:

CAB is the Microsoft Windows native compressed archive format. It supports compression and digital signing, and is used in a variety of Microsoft installation engines: Setup API, Device Installer, AdvPack (for the installation of ActiveX components from Internet Explorer) and Windows Installer.

It was originally called Diamond. Its .CAB file extension and overall file format name comes from word cabinet, internally used by Microsoft tools dealing with CAB files to reference such files.

I got a couple of resume templates from Microsoft Web Site, but the downloaded copies where in .cab format. So googled to find a way to extract them and learned that there is something called "cabextract".

On my Ubuntu box:

safeer@penguinpower:~/Desktop/PPTS$ sudo apt-cache search cabextract
cabextract - a program to extract Microsoft Cabinet files
liborange-dev - development libraries for liborange
liborange0 - library to extract CAB files from self-extracting installers
orange - extracts CAB files from self-extracting installers
safeer@penguinpower:~/Desktop/PPTS$ sudo apt-get install cabextract

RPM based distros can get the package from Dag Wieers' Repositories (if they don't have a native package).

And then, extracted the cab files without errors.

safeer@penguinpower:~/Desktop/PPTS$ cabextract 06199720.cab
06199720.cab: WARNING; possible 6960 extra bytes at end of file.
Extracting cabinet: 06199720.cab
extracting 06199720.dot
extracting content.inf

All done, no errors.
safeer@penguinpower:~/Desktop/PPTS$ cabextract 10168650.cab
10168650.cab: WARNING; possible 1024 extra bytes at end of file.
Extracting cabinet: 10168650.cab
extracting 10168650.dotx
extracting content.inf

All done, no errors.

The extracted files where in good shape and I was able to open them in Open Office.