WinRAR 7.0 | Hacker News Reader

WinRAR 7.0

rarlab.com

60 pointsmfiguiere60 comments

WinRAR was and still in fantastic software if you're working on Windows. I know there are CLI tools for macOS, FreeBSD, and Linux but in terms of guaranteed compatibility and being understood by users zip will always be my go-to format. It's like comparing AAC to MP3: the former is superior quality at a smaller size but I have to explain to some people (too many, really) how to play an AAC file while MP3 just works for everyone.

WinRAR is heavily entrenched in the PC space since the early Warez/DC++/BitTorrent days when storage and internet bandwidth was scarce so media was split in smaller files compressed as tightly as possible, preferably self extracting as well.

So any pirated content you'd download 20+ years ago was almost guaranteed to be RAR archived. Or sometimes even WinACE [1], anyone remember that one? It was awesome as well. Seems like the early 2000's was a war of compression formats similar to VHS vs Betamax decades earlier.

If you go on older established torrent trackers you can still find original torrents/content archived in RAR or ACE formats. Like Disney's Hercules for example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinAce

It's because since RAR is proprietary and didn't have a corporation friendly way to look inside those archives, so they couldn't be scanned.

For users, it was not an issue since they don't have to worry about licensing and whatnot.

WinRAR was also a fun target to write your very own crack for it. You could crack it multiple ways a well: remove the dialog and change texts, patch it to think it's licensed or write a keygen.

RAR had solid archiving, ZIP didn't.

That was HUGE for the emulation scene before 7zip, consider an SNES game:

1. JP version

2. NA version

3. PAL version

And possibly 1 or more revisions of each of the above.

With RAR the size was often not much more than if a single version was compressed. Not so with ZIP

PAR files!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive

Those work for any type of files though, not just RAR archives

par files still used in newsgroups.

It's my understanding that RAR has some kind of built in data recovery like PAR and I believe had better encryption support early on. IIRC traditional zip encryption was kind of a joke, maybe it was neutered to comply with the export restrictions from the 90s.

Spanning is old as dirt, I remember doing it with pkzip and floppies so I don't think it is something unique to RAR.

RAR file format have heavy encryption even on filenames. So 3rd party observers can't see what IS inside of archive actually.

If you encrypt ZIP file - then filenames aren't encrypted, only content.

WinAce, what fond memories. Remind me again why it never caught on?

I wish I could tell you but I don't know. I was also a fan of WinACE and found it very easy and pleasant to use to make self extracting archives to put on 1.44 inch floppies to take to school.

BTW, I just tried it out of nostalgia and the OG WinACE app still works on Windows 11 today.

Others were more accessible and good enough

Windows Explorer can already open them, kindof makes a third party app useless.

Windows Explorer is worse than 7z or others. Sometimes it doesnt work where other extract the content without problems.

On other hand WinRAR handles running software inside archive much better. So if you only need to run some portable tool one or two time it is pretty handy as there is no need to extract it.

I actually paid for winrar in 2006. The meme does happen.

There's a facebook group for people to announce they paid for WinRAR because of the no one pays for it meme. Can't remember what it was called.

I paid for winrar I think 15 years ago when I started working full time and it was the first shareware app I paid for. I don't use it as much as I used to nowadays.

Surprised it's still being updated. I thought the creator of WinRAR passed away.

WinRAR is still recommended in piracy circles.

Why NOT pay for software you use?

Especially if it's a useful tool and developed by a small team(one guy?) instead of an evil multi-trillion tax-dodging conglomerate.

I also paid for the BOSCH drill I use, my 4K monitor, ergonomic chair and other such work tools, so why not pay for SW tools as well?

> I also paid for the BOSCH drill I use, my 4K monitor, ergonomic chair and other such work tools, so why not pay for SW tools as well?

None of these are a useful comparison, since they're physical objects which cannot be infinitely copied, so the reasons to pay for them do not necessary apply to software.

> Why NOT pay for software you use?

Each person probably has a different answer, and the same person might have different answers in different situations. In my case, nearly all of the software I use is free software, which is offered free of charge (and any payment I make is actually a donation to the developer, not paying for the software).

> Why NOT pay for software you use?

[Not] paying for winrar was a meme. Hence my post. I buy everything I use.

I paid for both WinRAR and Sublime Text. Not sure if that makes me elite or silly.

In a world where tar, zip, zstd, and bzip2 exist - what are the usecases for rar?

When putting together a large RAR file that's been split into smaller files, one can use PAR and PAR2 files to repair and replace damaged or missing segments.

You can do this with any archive format - it's not unique to RAR

I think most other formats/software support things like splitting, "healing" archives and self-extracting archives by now, so the only reason I could think of is getting the "premium support" where you can quickly reach a human to help you with whatever problem you have. That might be more important for larger companies rather than individuals.

Who needs support for archives? I don’t think they’d help in the only case I can think of: corrupted files.

If you have an tar with compression and you only need one file in the middle it will takes times. Same problem exists with every compression like bzip2 that can compress only one file and requires an tar for multi file.

Back in the day you would hope for rar/par if you were downloading something big, like a program you couldn't afford but needed to try, I'll leave it at that.

RAR has recovery options, but it's propietary sadly.

You get to sound like a pirate.

Usenet

First law of u***net, is you don't talk about u***net

Does anyone know of other inexpensive software that supports customizable recovery records? AFAIK WinRAR is the only one.

A hidden gem of WinRar is that the internal file viewer can open multi gigabit text files faster than many editors.

And back in win98 and maybe xp days WinRar was a great way to escape file system access restriction imposed by the admin, you could use its internal browser to do access just about anything on the machine, even tough explorer and many other windows components wouldn't :)

Hugged to death, I guess.

Download:

> 429 Too Many Requests

> You have sent too many requests in a given amount of time.

Edit:

Once it did download, the installer says that it can't create some files because they're "being used by another process", except I don't have winrar running. Ugh.

Anyone remember UC2, ARJ?

Is this the most pirated piece of software of all time?

The trial never ends. /meme

The best part is when it's distributed as a .rar file

Trumpet Winsock is a strong contender.

"Creating archives in RAR 4.x format isn't supported anymore."

Can anyone using WinRar discuss why they prefer it over 7-Zip? In any case, I'm happy to see such ubiquitous software continue to be updated.

https://www.rarlab.com/

https://7-zip.org/

Stealing an older comment of mine since this comes up occasionally

- better .tar.gz handling: Winrar treats it as one file, 7zip as a tar in a gz that have to be extracted separately

- recovery records to be able to recover from mild bit rot (basically built-in .par2 without the mess)

- support for more NTFS attributes and features (saving alternate streams, security records, storing hard links as links instead of separate files, etc)

- can do useful things with the archive attribute of files if you so desire (archiving only files with the attribute set, clearing the attribute after, optionally deleting them)

- better GUI (the style is a bit dated, but the 7zip UI is just an incomplete WinRAR clone with smaller icons)

Overall WinRAR is the much more solid archival tool. If all you need is something to decompress archives WinRAR isn't too different from 7zip, but has a slightly nicer UX.

I love the batch archive extract capabilities and features like deleting each archive after extraction as you go really helps out when you are running low on space etc

> the 7zip UI is just an incomplete WinRAR clone with smaller icons

The icons still look like a Windows 3.1 app, but you can make them bigger:

View > Toolbars > Large Buttons

Also:

- Allows switching non-utf8 zip filename encodings from the menu, it's a mess with 7zip;

- Its context menu works inside Sandboxie without bugs;

- GUI is really much better, so I will reiterate the point. 7zip basically froze in time with it.

The developer of 7-zip has a questionable approach to security for an application that's meant to handle untrusted files, he prioritizes small binary size above hardening against exploits most of the time. DEP was disabled until 64-bit Windows forced the issue by making it mandatory, ASLR was disabled until fairly recently because he considered relocation tables to be unnecessary bloat, and the more advanced mitigations like CET and CFG still aren't used to this day. I don't know how robust the actual code is, but an attitude of executable size being the most important metric doesn't fill me with confidence that it tries to handle all possible edge cases.

With Windows 11 now having support for 7z/rar/etc built-in I'd be inclined to just default to using that if it covers your use-cases.

Question.

Does Microsoft have to pay a license for being able to support RAR or are they now effectively putting winrar out of business?

The unrar cli is published under a source-available license that you can't use it to build a rar compressor. So using knowledge from reading that might be fair game for building a rar decompressor, especially if you follow the usual clean-room protocols (one person reads the code and writes documentation, the other reads the documentation and writes new code).

Not sure how that will affect winrar in the long term. Of course people now aren't forced to download software to open rar files. But it also makes it much more viable to send .rar files to random people. And actual Winrar still offers you a lot of features that Windows doesn't have and seems to be a lot faster, so there are still plenty of reasons for power users to use it.

Personally I own a winrar license primarily for its features when creating archives, and Windows isn't encroaching on that.

I don't know but this is their response to the Microsoft's announcement.

https://twitter.com/WinRAR_RARLAB/status/1663493174642323457

> Windows 11 now having support for 7z/rar/etc built-in I'd be inclined to just default to using that if it covers your use-cases.

I hope Microsoft is keeping bsdtar/libarchive up to date. IIRC they weren't.

Considering neither WinRAR or 7-zip update themselves automatically, and most people never bother to update them manually, I'm not sure that's any worse than the status quo. The libraries bundled into Windows at least could be kept up to date by Windows Update.

Just saying that 7-Zip is great, both the compression (I use it for most of my data archival, because the higher compression ratio is worth the longer times to compress) and the software itself, pretty much what a good archival program on Windows should be like.

On other OSes, I guess I just use whatever is included with the distro, or something like PeaZip: https://peazip.github.io/

Curious to hear from RAR proponents.

My usual workflow with archive files (that I've just downloaded) is clicking the file in my browser's download list to open it and then extracting it. In WinRAR, the extraction path is pre-filled to be "<archive directory>/<archive name>", and there is an option to automatically open this folder after extraction. 7-Zip doesn't have this, so I'd need to manually add the archive name to the extraction path and then separately browse to it. Granted, if you browse to the archive and right click it, 7-Zip does have an option to extract to an "<archive name>" folder (though this still doesn't automatically open it afterwards), but that's an unnecessary extra step.

[delayed]

I used to use it a lot in the past and I think it was mostly the convenience factor for me personally. I didn't want to learn another piece of software and I thought that WinRar did what it was supposed to do, reasonably well.

I've ran into issues unzipping to a path too long with 7-Zip but immediately resolved with WinRAR. Might be a trivially solvable problem, but since WinRAR worked, I didn't bother investigating.

Support for splitted archives, recovery records, and encryption. And pretty good compression ratio too.

Maybe most archivers support these features today, but rar command line flags are in my muscle memory.

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