Re: Don’t Bother With Proprietary .RAR Compression

On Wed, 22 May 2024 01:22:58 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro
<ldo@nz.invalid> wrote in <v2jhdi$rilj$1@dont-email.me>:

Every now and then, I come across download archives in this .RAR format.
The formats have different versions: v4 and lower can be extracted with
Free Software tools like unar <https://theunarchiver.com/command-line>,
while v5 needs a non-Free tool.
 
A few times now, when I come across a v5 RAR archive, I try
recompressing it with 7-zip <https://7-zip.org/>, and so far, the .7z
version of archive has always been smaller. And 7-zip is Free Software!
 
So there is no point to using the proprietary format: avoid it.

Haven't used those in a long while, but I seem to remember they had
a companion type of file, ".par", which could be used to check archive
integrity, as well as fill in missing .rar parts.

Didn't know newer versions were proprietary.  You might have better
luck with unrar(1) if you're trying to get an an archive.

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-v