Re: Why Is Anybody Using WinRAR?

candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:

Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote at 17:18 this Thursday (GMT):

candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote at 00:56 this Thursday (GMT):

A few times, I have downloaded .rar archives and tried re-encoding
them as .7z. In every case, the 7-Zip version was smaller.
>
Why would anybody bother with .rar any more?
>
<https://www.tomshardware.com/software/winrar-exploit-enables-attackers-to-run-malicious-code-on-your-pc-critical-vulnerability-patched-in-latest-beta-update>

 
 
Compatibility?

>
The more common reason is that rar is used in "the scene" for video
files (I believe because it was first, way back, with the ability to
split a larger than X size file into X sized chunks as part of creating
the archive).  And then taking the resulting "rars" and upon
extraction, recreating that "larger than X" file.
>
Infozip has 'zipsplit', but it splits a zip up file by file, and if one
file is 4G, one of the output zips is also 4G.
>
7-zip may provide this "slice/reassemble" ability now (I don't know, I
don't make much of any use of it) but "legacy compatibility with the
way it has always been done" in "the scene" keeps 'rar' as the thing.
>
When one then obtains one of those files via other mechanisms
(bittorrent, alt.binaries.*, etc.) sometimes whomever posted the files
there simply leaves them as the original 'rar'.
>
>
Of course, for those of us with Linux/Unix backgrounds, we simply saw
windoze users recreating, badly, that which we already had available in
our toolset (split --bytes=1000000 big_file big_file_, followed later
by cat big_file_* > big_file to reasemble).

 
 
I'll also point out that tar supports splitting up files between
archives (i believe), and you can even extract files out of a single
archive as long as the whole file is stored there.

Yes it does (I forgot about its ability to do so) and was very
necessary when using it for its designed purpose (streaming the archive
to tape) given that each tape is of finite length.

And it is also another example of a tool that those who know only
winblows would not know existed and so they would be inclined to
"recreate something similar, and poorly".

Not sure if that trick works if you add compression, but it's there.

Since compression is added after the "tar" processing, it has no
bearing on the splitting.