Re: Why Is Anybody Using WinRAR?

On Thu, 26 Jun 2025 17:18:02 -0000 (UTC), Rich wrote:

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).

Also recovery record was kinda useful in times of floppies and dial-up
modems

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_archive_formats#Comparison