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In computing, RAR (pronounced Rare) is a compressed archive format developed by Eugene Roshal. His main product is WinRAR, which is shareware. Pocket RAR, a version of the RAR archiver for the Pocket PC platform, is available as freeware.
Eugene Roshal has also released source code for decoding RAR archives, under a licence that allows free distribution and modification, but forbids its use to build a compatible encoder. The encoding method is held to be proprietary.
One of the advantages of the RAR format is that it excels at producing split volumes. Few other compression formats have the ability not only to process volumes, but do it well.
Another advantage of the RAR format is its encryption capabilities. RAR encryption is very strong, and while a fast computer could try several million passwords per second on other archive formats, it could only try a few thousand on an encrypted RAR file.
The file extension is .rar. The MIME-Type is application/x-rar-compressed.
Comparison to Zip compression
Rar compression operations are typically slower than compressing the same data with Zip, but better compression is achieved in most cases.
Notes
The warez scene has adopted RAR as its file compression standard.
See also
External links
- WinRAR (http://www.rarlab.com/)
- MacRAR (http://macrar.free.fr/)
- UnRarX (http://unrarx.sourceforge.net/) UnRar for Mac OS X
- RAR add-ons (http://www.rarlabs.com/rar_add.htm) – UnRAR for various platforms, including Eugene Roshal's source code
- Unrarlib (http://www.unrarlib.org/) – a library for decoding RAR (version 2) archives based on the Roshal's code, might be GPL compatible
- 7-Zip (http://www.7-zip.org/) is an LGPL licensed utility that supports 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB.
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