Hi
I recently acquired a lot of blah.0xx files that are supposed to make up blah.bin for cd burning. however, i can't figure out how to actually get the .bin file from these .001, .002, etc. I tried unrar -x blah.001, didn't work. there's also a .sfv file, don't think that'll help with the extracting, but may be it does.

thanks in advance

It's most likely a RAR compressed archive. Grab the latest stable RAR version here.

Install it according to the instructions. Then you simply type rar x filename.001 and it will unpack all the files in the archive.

The sfv file is used for weak and unreliable file verification. You can use cksfv to check the files: Type cksfv -f sfvfile.sfv (where sfvfile.sfv is the .sfv that came with the RAR files) to verify them. Obviously a better choice would be using md5 sums but pirates seem to like sfv files.


Håkan

ahh. who'd have thought that that to extract one would need to rar as opposed to unrar. thanks a lot!

The file pattern looks more like a split file than an rar archive. Sometimes someone will upload a file split up into sections along with partity files, which would allow you to use par or par2 to recover missing or damaged files.

So for example, suppose that you have 6 files named blah.bin.000, blah.bin.001, blah.bin.002, blah.bin.003, blah.bin.004, and blah.bin.005. These files need to be joined to form blah.bin.
However, if the sender used a windows program to split the files, the blah.bin.000 is probably a text file that the program uses, and not one of the component parts. You can look at a long listing: ls -l blah.bin.* to check for a short file length. If blah.bin.000 is very short and the filelength doesn't match blah.bin.001, then you need to either delete the file or move it somewhare else or rename the extension.
ex: mv blah.bin.000 blah.bin.000.tmp

Now simply use the cat command to join the files:
cat blah.bin.[[:digit:]][[:digit:]][[:digit:]] >blah.bin

The reason for moving/deleting/renaming the .000 file is so that the pattern doesn't match which would have started the file with the .000 segment.


If there are files by the names similar to blah.bin.p01 or blah.bin.par then you may want to install the 'par' program. Another parity program is 'par2', which uses files which look like blah.bin.vol00+32.PAR2.

I installed both of these programs from source. Using them you can recover a missing download as long as you also have enough parity files downloaded.

--------------

PS. The programs rar and unrar are different. The 'rar' program is shareware while the 'unrar' program is freeware.

The rar program will be able to extract archives as well as creating them.