RAR is a powerful tool allowing you to manage and control archive files. Console RAR supports archives only in RAR format, the names of which usually have a ".rar" extension. ZIP and other formats are not supported. Windows users may install GUI RAR version - WinRAR, which is able to process many more archive types.
RAR features include:
* Highly sophisticated, original compression algorithm
* Special compression algorithms optimized for text, audio, graphics data, 32 and 64-bit Intel executables
* Better compression than similar tools, using 'solid' archiving
* Authenticity verification (registered version only)
* Self-extracting archives and volumes (SFX)
* Ability to recover physically damaged archives
* Locking, password, file order list, file security & more ...
Configuration file
RAR for Unix reads configuration information from the file .rarrc in the user's home directory (stored in HOME environment variable) or in /etc directory.
RAR for Windows reads configuration information from the file rar.ini, placed in the same directory as the rar.exe file.
This file may contain the following string:
switches=
Environment variable
Default parameters may be added to the RAR command line by establishing
an environment variable "RAR".
For instance, in UNIX following lines may be added to your profile:
RAR='-s -md1024'
export RAR
RAR will use this string as default parameters in the command line and will create "solid" archives with 1024 KB sliding dictionary size.
RAR handles options with priority as following:
command line switches highest priority switches in the RAR variable lower priority switches saved in configuration file lowest priority.
Log file
The file order list for solid archiving - rarfiles.lst
rarfiles.lst contains a user-defined file list, which tells RAR the order in which to add files to a solid archive. It may contain file names, wildcards and special entry - $default. The default entry defines the place in order list for files not matched with other entries in this file. The comment character is ';'.
In Windows this file should be placed in the same directory as RAR, in Unix - to the user's home directory or in /etc.
Tips to provide improved compression and speed of operation:
- similar files should be grouped together in the archive;
- frequently accessed files should be placed at the beginning.
