Native operating system support

RARlab's native software is available for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

(named WinRAR),

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

, and

Android Android most commonly refers to: *Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), a mobile operating system primarily developed by Google * Android TV, a operating system developed ...

; archive extraction is supported natively in

ChromeOS ChromeOS, sometimes styled as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS, is an operating system designed and developed by Google. It is derived from the open-source operating system and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user ...

. WinRAR and RAR for Android support the

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

(GUI); other versions named RAR run as console commands.

Creating RAR files

RAR files can only be created with proprietary

WinRAR WinRAR is a trialware file archiver utility, developed by Eugene Roshal of win.rar GmbH. It can create and view archives in RAR or ZIP file formats, and unpack numerous archive file formats. To enable the user to test the integrity of archive ...

(Windows), RAR for Android,

command-line A command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with software via commands each formatted as a line of text. Command-line interfaces emerged in the mid-1960s, on computer terminals, as an interactive and more user-friendly alternativ ...

RAR (available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD), and other software that has written permission from Alexander Roshal or uses copyrighted code under license from Roshal. The software license agreements forbid reverse engineering.

Third-party software for extracting RAR files

Several programs can unpack the file format. * RARLAB distributes the

C++ C++ (, pronounced "C plus plus" and sometimes abbreviated as CPP or CXX) is a high-level, general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup. First released in 1985 as an extension of the C programmin ...

source code and binaries for a command-line unrar program. The license permits its use to produce software capable of unpacking, but not creating, RAR archives, without having to pay a fee. It is not a

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

license. *

7-Zip 7-Zip is a free and open-source file archiver, a utility used to place groups of files within compressed containers known as "archives". It is developed by Igor Pavlov and was first released in 1999. 7-Zip has its own Archive file, archive forma ...

, a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

program, starting from 7-Zip version 15.06 beta can unpack RAR5 archives, using the RARLAB unrar code. * PeaZip is a free RAR unarchiver, licensed under the LGPLv3-or-later and via 7-Zip can unpack RAR archives, using RARLAB unrar. * The Unarchiver is a proprietary freeware software unarchiver for Mac for RAR and other formats. It was previously

licensed under the LGPLv2.1-or-later, up to version 3.11.1 (released 2016), which at the time provided a free-software implementation of extraction of RAR versions up to RAR5. There is a free software (LGPLv2.1-or-later) command-line version, , forked from 2016, which runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. * UNRARLIB (UniquE RAR File Library) was an obsolete free software unarchiving library called "unrarlib", licensed under the GPLv2-or-later. It could only decompress archives created by RAR versions prior to 2.9; archives created by RAR 2.9 and later use different formats not supported by this library. The original development-team ended work on this library in 2007. * libarchive, a free and open-source library for reading and writing a variety of archive formats, with partial support for all RAR versions, including RAR5. The code was written from scratch using RAR's “technote.txt” format description. *

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

announced (May 23, 2023) native support for additional archive formats in

Windows 11 Windows 11 is a version of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system, released on October 5, 2021, as the successor to Windows 10 (2015). It is available as a free upgrade for devices running Windows 10 that meet the #System requirements, Windo ...

, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the

libarchive libarchive is a free and open-source library for reading and writing various archive and compression formats. It is written in C and works on most Unix-like systems and Windows. History libarchive's development was started in 2003 as part of ...

open-source project. Recently (July 16, 2023), there have been Insider builds that have native support. It’s said to come out in version 23H2.

Other uses of ''rar''

The filename extension ''rar'' is also used by the unrelated

Resource Adapter aRchive Jakarta Connectors (JCA; formerly known as Java EE Connector Architecture and J2EE Connector Architecture) are a set of Java programming language tools designed for connecting application servers and enterprise information systems (EIS) as a part ...

file format.

External links

*
RARLAB FTP download website
current and old versions of WinRAR and RAR

References