RAR

Shareware; $29

Current Version: 3.8.0 (October 6, 2008)

RAR is the official RAR archive utility for Mac OS X (offered as a command line utility), especially useful while reading all those alt.binaries newsgroups.

Version 3.8.0 adds the following new features:

• Added support for ZIP archives containing Unicode file names in UTF-8 format. When creating ZIP archive, WinRAR stores names in Unicode only if they cannot be stored correctly using the current single byte character set.
• Added decompression support for WinZip AES encrypted ZIP archives.
• Improved Unicode support for RAR and ZIP archive names.
• "Ask before overwrite" and "Skip existing files" update modes are now available in archiving dialog. They allow to specify WinRAR behavior when updating already existing files in archive. Unlike already available "Fresh existing files only" and "Add and update files", these new modes ignore file date and compare only file names.
• New "Add to context menu" option in "Profile parameters" dialog. If this option is on, the profile name will be displayed in Explorer context menus allowing to activate a profile from context menu.
• New -cp switch allows to select a compression profile in command line mode. It is supported only by GUI WinRAR.exe, not by rar.exe.
• New "Options" page of archiving dialog contains the group of settings modifying the behavior of "Delete files after archiving" option from "General" page.
• WinRAR "Extraction path and options" dialog is now resizable. You can use the mouse to drag its border to the desired size and provide more space for folder tree pane. WinRAR will store new dimensions of this dialog.
• New "Update" SFX script command and "Update mode" group of options in "Update" page of "Advanced SFX options" dialog. These command and options allow to check time and implement file time based updating.
• SFX script "Shortcut" command and "Add shortcut..." command in "Advanced SFX options" dialog now allow to specify an icon file containing an icon associated with shortcut.
• New "Wipe temporary files" option in "Settings/Security" dialog provides more secure, though slower, way to delete temporary WinRAR files.
• WinRAR and RAR display the total progress bar when unpacking a multivolume RAR archive if all volumes are present in the same folder.
• WinRAR and RAR automatically expand names of environment variables in list files.
• Added support of TAR archives with non-zero "extra field" data.
• Added support of TAR archives, which does not contain the end of archive entry consisting of 512 zero bytes.
• Improved Unicode support when dragging files from WinRAR window.
• Shift+Tab key combination can be used in main WinRAR window t switch the input focus between interface elements (files, comment, tree, address) in reverse order. In previous versions Shift+Tab used the same order as Tab.
• Corrected a possible WinRAR crash when opening truncated UDF ISO files.

To use the RAR command line application, place the files in any folder on your hard drive, and call the utility by typing in the full path to the application (e.g., to run from the current directory, type "./rar" or "./unrar" followed by the appropriate parameters). Typing the application name (rar or unrar) without any parameters will produce a helpful guide to each program's usage.