Hi folks this is fustrating, I have a rar file i made in windows a while back and for the life of me I cant remember the password, is there a nix product to solve this problem? I have tried to install a couple of window rar recovery products using xover office but every time it finds a dam virus? in the setup file and shuts down.
TIA for any help grrrrrrrrrr

Try: John the Ripper password cracker. Get it from here: www.openwall.com/john/

I've come across such posts many times... You prolly downloaded something that you don't want to pay for... At least thats the case most often. The problem is that cracking archive passwords is very impractical unless you own a supercomputer. If the data is so valuable to you, you might as well start building one now.
On my rig, socket 754 Sempron 3400+ 768MB DDR400 on nForce4 chipset, a 6 character long password will on average take more than a year to crack at full load. As you know, with increasing length the number of combinations increases exponentially...
Really... If the password is longer than 4 random characters, forget about it. Of course if the file was indeed created by you, and you know you didn't put any fancy characters other than letters and numbers your cracking can take far less time. Do you remember how long the password was?

Why would you say something like that? Are you implying that this user is dishonest?

Utter rubbish, however impractical it is most certainly achievable without owning a supercomputer.

Really? Back in the day my AMD 450mhz with 128mb of ram took running day & night 2 months using brute-force attack to retrieve a forgotton password on a rar file. I do concede that I knew the password would not be any longer than 7 characters, but I couldn't remember if I had used fancy characters, upper & lowercase combinations or numbers. As it turned out the pass was indeed 7 characters long!!

Whatever this rar file contains, it's of enough importance that the user is willing to try and retrieve the password. Who are we to say if it's worth the effort or not.

You go for it ockertom. Good Luck.

Ahem... That would be true if you only used alphabet and the numbers, which I mentioned. If you include the complete printable ASCII set for brute force cracking, you are tripling the possibility for each character, thus increasing the number of combinations exponentially...
You should learn to read really... See? I can use bold too.
For the record I did say this
Really, you can argue all you want... I've heard stories of people running Quake 4 on Pentium MMX... In reality, there might be some truth to it - it must have been a dedicated server which does not require sound or video. Its all about complexity of a task. Yours just wasn't complex.
I do not discourage archive password cracking, but at maximum complexity it loses practicality. That guy better remember what sort of password he used.

So should you, nowhere in ockertoms post does it ask for reasons not to try and crack a password.

It's not my intention to argue over semantics.

The point I was making is ockertom came here for a solution to a problem, if you can't offer a solution then is it not better to offer nothing at all!!

Anyways let's just leave it there. If my previous reply ruffled your feathers a little then please accept my apology.