14 DAY TRIAL // Developed by Alexander Roshal, RAR is a powerful tool that allows you to manage and control archive files. The archive is usually a regular file whose name contains a ".rar" suffix. RAR is also available for Linux and for FreeBSD.
Thanks to recent updates released by Roshal, RAR introduces an original compression algorithm that allows it to do higher compression ratios than other PC archiving tools, especially on executable files, object libraries, large text files, etc. The program offers an optional, highly optimized compression algorithm aimed at multimedia, while creating a 'solid' archive is also possible. With this feature, Mac users can raise the compression ratio by 10% - 50%. The method is used particularly when packing multiple small files.
Besides offering the ability to create and change SFX archives using default and external SFX modules, as well as to create a multi-volume archive as SFX, RAR also includes a number of service functions, like setting a password, adding comments, and more. A list of changes available with the release of RAR 3.90 for Mac OS X is available below.
- New command line switch -r- disables recursion completely. - So 'rar a -r- arc dirname' command will add only the empty dirname folder and ignore its contents. By default, if dirname does not include wildcards, RAR adds its contents even if -r switch is not specified. - If used when extracting, the new command line switch -ai forces RAR to ignore file attributes. When using this switch, extracted files will always have attributes assigned by operating system to a newly created file by default. - If output file name is not specified in "cw" command, RAR will send comment data to stdout. - When compressing stdin data with -si[name] switch, RAR sets modification time of archived entry to current system time. - Previous RAR versions did not fill this field, resulting in meaningless modification time for stdin.
RAR doesn’t come as your regular OS X app, but rather under the form of a command line application. Use the link below to download the new version of the software.