Re: Why Is Anybody Using WinRAR?

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. Not sure if that
trick works if you add compression, but it's there.
--
user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom