[ale] rar file, can anything read it on Linux?

Michael B. Trausch fd0man at gmail.com
Wed Apr 19 16:04:09 EDT 2006


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Jerald Sheets wrote On 04/19/2006 01:38 PM:
> I've quietly wondered that to myself of late as well.
> 
> Ideas?
> 
> --Jerald
> 

RAR, among other things, for a number of years (and even through to
today, I think) was a widely used format for the piracy of software
programs.  It has been around for quite a long time.

The RAR format itself is proprietary in a sense -- you have to get a
license to use the encoder, and while the decoder is open, it is open
under the terms of not using it for the purpose of reverse engineering
it to create a RAR encoder.

It is a highly durable format for compression of many various types of
data, and at one time, was the best format out there for encoding
things.  It is capable of saving NTFS security data and streams, which
is one of its more interesting features.  The format can use AES for
encryption of the items that it holds, secured with a 128-bit key.

The web site purports that it is possible to have a maximum archive size
of 8,589,000,000,000,000,000 GB in size (approx 8.5 exabytes), though I
know of no way to test this theory as I have nothing *close* to that
amount of storage available to me, even combined across the computers
that I have accounts on.

RAR has also been known to be used to encrypt and compress audio and
video of the more "adult" variety.

For whatever reason, it has become more popular then it used to be and
appears to have left the genre of mostly bootlegged software, graphics,
video, and audio.  I'm not quite sure of why, because IIRC, 7-Zip is a
more efficient compression format in general-purpose use, though
Wikipedia says that RAR and 7-Zip pretty much match each other depending
on the specific purpose, though 7-Zip is freely available and RAR is
not, at least legally.

Nowhere was I able to find a concise history of RAR, which is kind of a
shame, as I am curious as to when the compression format was originally
engineered myself.  I only know that it's been around for quite some
time as I recall somebody once asking me about the format quite some
time ago, and I had never heard of it at that point, which sent me
searching for information on it.  Perhaps somebody here will be able to
find the information if it is important enough.

	- Mike

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAR - Some general RAR information.
http://www.rarlab.com/ - Official RAR web site
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