Batch decompress encrypted rar files with unar

Question

I'm on macOS and I downloaded unar to decompress encrypted rar files. It works fine for individual files but I can't get it to work with a wildcard for multiple files.

I have a list of rar files which have filenames from 01...10 and the unar executable in the current folder.

myArchive01.rar
myArchive02.rar
..
myArchive10.rar

It works great for one single file:

$ ./unar -p myPassword myArchive01.rar
myArchive01.rar: RAR
  myText.txt  (1000 B)... OK.
Successfully extracted to "./myText.txt".

But I don't get it to work with a bunch of files:

$ ./unar -p myPassword myArchive*.rar
myArchive01.rar: RAR
No files extracted.

I could of course use the built in batch functions in macOS, but I wanted to know how unar does this by it's own

$ for i in {1..10}; do ./unar -p myPassword myArchive${i}.rar; done

Can anybody help out?

Answer 1

You could use find and exec to extract the files sequentially.

Eg. find ./ -name myArchive* -exec unar -p myPassword {} \;

What that does is uses find to find all files matching the name pattern, and then execute the command after exec for each found result.

Answer 2

It doesn't seem to take wildcards indeed, only a list of files.

You can use the find -exec command to run the unar command on each file found:

find . -name "*.rar" -exec unar {} \;