What UnRar utilities are available for Mac OS X?

I have been using UnRarX ( http://www.unrarx.com/ ) and it's free and works well, but often times I will download a rar file in the browser and click on it in the recent downloads lists which will extract it but not show it in the finder.

Ideally I'd like a small program which will extract a rar file and then show the contents / directory where it is extracted to.

I looked at the preferences for UnRarX but didn't see an option like this.

cwd

Posted 2011-11-15T20:54:24.537

Reputation: 13 508

1Unrelated comment - everyone uses zip or tar+compress/gzip/bzip, so why do i occasionally stumble on these oddballs who use this obscure RAR format? – Michael – 2014-07-04T22:24:14.750

^^ zip is the most popular compression format, for a long time rar was second and still is in windows. It gets better compression then zip and allowed password protection and solid archives before anyone else. Everyone in the *nix world maybe ;) – Eric Sebasta – 2017-02-09T12:17:49.267

– Lri – 2011-11-15T23:55:55.860

Answers

The Unarchiver works rather well for most .rar files — it might have issues with password protected or split archives though, at least in some older versions.

It supports a large number of archive formats and is as easy to use as BOMArchiveHelper : Double click and it extracts.

enter image description here

Daniel Beck

Posted 2011-11-15T20:54:24.537

Reputation: 98 421

What is BOMArchiveHelper ? – cwd – 2011-11-15T21:14:45.110

@cwd BOMArchiveHelper, or "Archive Utility" since 10.5, is OS X's integrated zip/tar/gz/bz2 extraction tool. – Daniel Beck – 2011-11-15T21:16:17.600

cool. thanks. also - what applescript resources do you have in your toolbox? like script editors, debugging tools, etc? I know that's not related but i don't think you can PM on superuser. – cwd – 2011-11-15T21:16:46.060

@cwd No problem. I actually only use AppleScript Editor (and only recently discovered its useful event log), Google, and lots and lots of time. Once you get over its quirks the documentation via the Library is almost all you need. Is there a specific problem you struggle with? – Daniel Beck – 2011-11-15T21:25:04.787

I'm just used to having more development tools available to troubleshoot problems, see values stored in variables, etc. How do you access the event log? Whenever I use applescript it's almost like taking a step backwards and I just thought I was doing something wrong. ScriptDebugger is kind of cool - you should try it sometime - but I was still hoping for something more. – cwd – 2011-11-15T21:37:42.510

By the way, Daniel has a mail address and sometimes also visits chat ;) – slhck – 2011-11-15T23:25:36.030

@cwd I'm not doing too much AppleScript development, certainly not enough to buy scriptdebugger, so AppleScript editor is fine. Most of what I do with it is documented on this site, actually. The event log is in the window menu. – Daniel Beck – 2011-11-16T07:00:54.430

If you like to work on the command line, the unrar utility is available via homebrew - you can install it with:

brew install unrar

Bill Agee

Posted 2011-11-15T20:54:24.537

Reputation: 1 021

11And here is the command for extracting: unrar e filename. – totymedli – 2015-05-08T07:26:27.280

16unrar x filename to extract with full path (that is what I usally want) – tato – 2016-01-28T13:00:48.047

3You can also get unrar with brew cask install rar, which has the added bonus of installing the rar utility for creating archives. – GDP2 – 2018-02-19T22:26:24.397

The Unarchiver does that. You can also set it to open the files after extraction. Just open The Unarchiver.app after you've installed it, if you ever need to change the settings again.

enter image description here

slhck

Posted 2011-11-15T20:54:24.537

Reputation: 182 472

StuffIt expander works for rar and other archives and is free in the App Store.

AXE Labs

Posted 2011-11-15T20:54:24.537

Reputation: 509