Opening And Extracting .rar Files in Linux/Unix system

Rar is a very famous compression technique used for compressing the file. Most files from internet can be downloaded from internet in the form of zip or rar files. But unlike zip for which we can directly use the unzip command same can"t be follow until you install unrar utility.

RAR is a proprietary file format for data compression and archiving which is developed by Eugene Roshal. You can find the official site in here.

Under Linux and Unix OS the command used is unrar but since by default unrar is not installed on the OS , so you need to install it with the help of yum command.

For Fedora Linux you can simply install it with the help of the Yum whose command is as follows
#yum install unrar

Another way which i used to install the package is directly downloading from its site. You can download it from here 


since the file you downloaded is in gunzip format use;
# tar -zxvf rarlinux-3.6.0.tar.gz

 when you use above command it will show you output like 



rar/
rar/file_id.diz
rar/license.txt
rar/Makefile
rar/order.htm
rar/rarfiles.lst
rar/rar.txt
rar/readme.txt
rar/technote.txt
rar/whatsnew.txt
rar/rar
rar/rar_static
rar/unrar
rar/default.sfx




do ls it would have now created a rar subdirectory. just go to rar directory as follows:-


$ cd rar
$ ./unrar

Now copy rar and unrar to /bin directory:
# cp rar unrar /bin

 
that is you are done now go and open your file with following command:
$ unrar e file.rar

Option with rar	Description
unrar l filename.rar	List file inside rar archive
unrar x filename.rar	Open (x) files
unrar t filename.rar	Test the integrity of the archieve