RAR is a powerful archive manager that can be used to reduce the size of files and to decompress RAR, ZIP, and other formats. A new major upgrade has been released, bring the version number up to 5.30.
Despite the reputation of RAR as being a Windows application, it’s good to know that it’s also available on other platforms, like Linux for example. Sure, it’s not the most popular, but that hasn’t stopped the RAR developers from supporting Linux.
Unlike the version that ships for the Windows platform, and which is named Winrar, the Linux edition works only in a terminal. That doesn’t mean that it can’t do pretty much everything that its Windows counterpart can, just that it doesn’t have a fancy GUI.
RAR 5.30 comes with Linux-only features
It’s been a while since the previous major update for RAR. The first Beta for the new 5.30 branch was made available in July, but now it’s finally here. A good part of the changelog is about Linux-only features, and that can only be a good thing.
According to the changelog, the archive test command now works for tar.gz, tar.bz2, and tar.xz archives (only GZIP, BZIP2 or XZ containers can be checked), a new ‘R’ object for -sc switch defines encoding of console, the console RAR “l” and “v” commands display file time in YYYY-MM-DDc format, and the modification time is set for all folders created when unpacking .7z archives.
Also, the extraction of multipart ZIP archives created by 7-Zip is now possible, the extraction of files split to multiple parts with .001, .002, and so on is now supported, and numerous smaller bugs have been corrected.
You can download RAR 5.30 right now from Softpedia. This is a binary file and you don’t need to install it. Just extract the archive and run RAR in a terminal.
Via Softpedia