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Compression: Which is the RAR archiver?

I

ICEBreaker

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 12, 2007
270
3
Dear forum members,

I have been using WinRAR on the PC for years and like many users, I would attest that the RAR format is the best archiving format out there. However, now that I am a Mac user, I am having difficulty finding something like WinRAR. UnRarX is a popular choice for uncompressing RAR files. However, I am trying to CREATE RAR files. Any luck?

What formats do you usually use for compressing or archiving files? ZIP?

Thanks!
JC
 
Shadow said:
Please read ;)

OP: I dont use RAR at all, as I find that .tbz (tar bzip2) has much higher compression ratio. To create .tbz files I use GUI Tar.
Click to expand...

SHADOW: Thank you for your reply!! Just as I feared, it seems like not many Mac users use RAR. I'll give TBZ a look over. Thanks.

TDM21: Thanks for those sites. They will come in handy for other software I might want to look up. As for RAR Archiver (not reader), I can't find anything on those sites at first look.

bjett92: Thanks for the tip. ZIP is fine, but not as good as RAR. I guess beggers can't be choosers.
 
You can download a rar command line client from rarlabs (the guys behind WinRAR). I believe you can use the same license key file as WinRAR too if you already have one. If you then add the rar folder to your path, then you can rar things in any folder from the command line using the rar command (typing rar by itself will give you the usage, a list of commands and switches).
 
Hi CJH, thanks for your reply. Although I am happy with using command line, being a DOS-era kid, I am worried that it won't be able to interpret filenames that are in foreign language (German/Japanese) and screw it up. I suppose I could give it a try first. Would prefer something OS-Xesque though... that's the reason why I decided to try out Macs in the first place. :apple:
 
SimplyRAR: VERY slow.

MacPAR deLuxe: strange settings, do not seem to work properly for compression. Why do we care about PNN files? compression controls do not seem to work properly once you RAR a file (RAR file, and try RARing again, even after quitting and restarting, gives funky results, one time it try to make 50 450mb files from a 5gb file, then other times the files just won't show up, 10.4.11, intel mac).
 
Thank you Maccleduff! I think this will be very useful.

I see Consultant, thank you for your review on those two RAR programs. I shall be keeping away from those!
 
Well, looking for a good compression utility myself.

SimplyRAR works, didn't say avoid, but it seems very slow to me. Currently testing it.

RARme has not been updated for awhile so I haven't tested it yet. Do you have any luck with it?

Might have to give the other format a try.
 
Hi Consultant. I have installed and used RarMe. It appears to work fine, at least during my simple test of archiving, extracting and verifying the extracted contents. (My test PDF files opened fine). Not sure about the more advanced functions though, but I would assume it should be OK.

I think it is best to actually learn the RARLAB command line parameters and then use RarMe as a helper application only. Can verify the terminal switches manually.

For installation, remember to place only the executable files into RarMe's Resources folder. I placed the entire RAR folder into the Resources folder, which didn't work. i.e. Don't create a RAR subfolder within the Resources folder.
 
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