Hey Guys,

What is an .rar file and what is the difference between an .rar file versus and .iso file.

Does an .rar file have to be uncompressed in order to burn it? And if you do burn it, will you be able to see it?

Can an .rar file be uncompressed with Linux and if so can it be converted to an .iso file, and if it can, how can someone do this?

I tried doing a search on this topic and could not find anything....

d-1

find unrar at www.freshmeat.net

I went to that site and saw nothing in regards to .rar files or unrar.

d-1

1. What is a RAR file

RAR is the native format of WinRAR archiver. Like other archives, RAR files are data containers, they store one or several files in the compressed form. After you downloaded RAR file from Internet, you need to unpack its contents in order to use it.
2. How to handle RAR files

WinRAR provides the complete support for RAR files, so you may both create and unpack them. If you installed WinRAR on your computer and downloaded RAR file from Internet, you may double click on RAR file icon to open it in WinRAR, select all files, press "Extract To" button, enter a destination path and press "OK". Another way is to click on the RAR file in Explorer using the right mouse button. If you enabled "Shell integration" option when installing WinRAR, the file context menu will contain "Extract to ..." item.

Some RAR files can be parts of multi-volume sequences. In WinRAR you can split a huge archive to a few smaller files, which are called volumes. They may have extensions .rar (the first volume), .r00, .r01, ..., or .part1.rar (the first volume), .part2.rar, ..., etc. If you need to unpack volumes, place all them to the same folder and start extraction from the first volume.
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Question: Can Linux unpack an .rar file, or must you download a software tool that will recognize it?

d-1

I use "ark" (the KDE archiving tool) to open .rar files. I don't recall if I had to download something to make that work ....

But, back to your original question, a .rar file is like a .zip file - a container containing one or more compressed files. (They use different compression algorithms, but the concept is the same.)

A .iso file, on the other hand, is an image of a CD (or DVD), that can be burned directly to the medium. It, too, is a container of one or more files, but instead of being compressed for storage reasons, they are formatted exactly as you would find them on a disc. You can *open* a .iso file by mounting it as if it were a filesystem.

Edit: You can get RAR for Linux here.

Rar is simply a compression format the same a zip or tar is. I saw rar files most popular on usenet for windoze pirate appz prior to the emergence of p2p programs. It is simply a compressed data file. Yes, you can burn it without uncompressing it, don't matter. As whansard mentioned, you must install unrar to uncompress it, also available as rpm from Plf source. By the way, unrar is command line, but once it is installed, compression gui frontends such as Ark can then unrar. An iso file is an image file. An iso file is different than a data file and is essentially an "image" file. Think of it as a "virtual" cd or dvd. If somebody posts an iso of something they are posting a copy of, so you can download it and burn it as an iso and end up with an exact copy of what they started with, be it a cd or dvd or even less usual things. Back to the rar to iso idea, rar files normally are not meant to be burned as iso format. The exception being if you unrar a rar file to find your finished product has a .iso extension.

Hope this makes some sense of it.

Yes the posts are making it a lot more clearer, for I had never heard of an .rar file before. I have heard of .zip files.

Where I am not clear is how to unpack it, if that's the proper term to use.

I found these directions below, but do I even have to install "winrar" for linux in order to extract the .rar files? And my other important question that I don't understand is the part about copying the "rarreg.key" to my resistery. I underlined it below. Can you give an example on how to do this?

d-1

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How to install Rar on Linux?


After unpacking the archive using "tar xvfz rarlinux-3.2.0.tar.gz" on your Linux machine, copy all the RAR files to /usr/sbin/. (except the text files).

As a registered user, copy the rarreg.key to your home directory, for example /root/ or /home/user.

Then start RAR at the command line.

If you get the following error message:

rar: error in loading shared libraries: libstdc++
cannot open shared object file

...please use the static version of RAR -> "rar_static".

Padma,

If "Ark" tool will work without having to install anything I would prefer that over installing "winrar"....

Are you sure "Ark" was able to recognize and extract the rar files?

d-1

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No offence Padma, thought I'd jump in on this one as it was recently I had to do this. Ark is a frontend, the rar format is not installed by default and yes it must be installed. Once installed most frontends (graphical interface) will then be able to deal with it.

Thanks Lakota,

I will attempt this and report back either way.

d-1

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Thanks, Lakota. I read your post, and that *must* have been what I did.

Hey Lakota, That worked great, I did the urmpi "unrar" and it worked.....I unpacked or extracted the file.....

d-1

/me is n00b and this is his first post :P

Maybe this is just in windows but i thought .iso-files are cdimages..

Skroeder: That is essentially what we said.

.iso files are images of a CD (or DVD), which can be burned directly to a disk, or even mounted as separate filesystems.