WinRAR

I'll be giving an overview of WinRAR in this post. We usually encounter this software whenever we download audio or video files on the web. It is use to compress files into smaller packages. More definitions below:

WinRAR is a shareware file archiver and data compression utility developed by Eugene Roshal, and first released in autumn of 1993. It is one of the few applications that is able to create RAR archives natively, because the encoding method is held to be proprietary.

Developer

The current developer is Eugene Roshal, while his brother Alexander Roshal is engaged in running the business behind the software.

From: wikipedia.org

RAR stands for Roshal ARchive. It is a proprietary archive file format that supports data compression, error recovery, and file spanning. It was developed by a Russian software engineer, Eugene Roshal (the first letter of his surname contributing to the name of the archive format), and is currently licensed by win.rar GmbH. The filename extension used by RAR is .rar for the data volume set and .rev for the recovery volume set. In previous versions, if a RAR-archive was broken into many smaller files (a "multi-volume archive") then the smaller files used the extensions .rar, .r00, .r01, .r02 etc.

Version 1 and 2 archive files were often used in conjunction with a parchive file archiver to create parity files for error recovery when using less-than-perfect file transmission and storage media such as newsgroups, satellite transmission, and optical discs. Version 3 has eliminated the need for third party post-processing.

WinRAR is commercial software (or 40-day trial) available for Microsoft Windows. It is the only graphical tool that can write modern RAR files (RAR version 3). WinRAR's command line equivalent, RAR, is also commercial software (or 40-day trial), available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, MS-DOS, OS/2, and FreeBSD. Additionally, the unrar tool from the same distributor can be used on the aforementioned platforms to extract RAR files but not to write them.

Roshal created the RAR file format and developed programs for packing and unpacking RAR files, originally for DOS which were later ported to other platforms. The main Windows version of the archiver, known as WinRAR, is distributed as trialware, requiring payment after 40 days (although it can still be used after this period, albeit with nags; shareware versions of this program are also available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, DOS, OS/2, and FreeBSD, though they are all called simply "RAR". RARLAB distributes the source code and binaries for a freeware command-line "unrar" program, although it is not under a free software license. This program can only decompress/extract, not create RAR files.

RAR file limitations
The minimum size of a RAR file is 20 bytes. The maximum size of a RAR file is 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (263-1) bytes, which is 8 exabytes.


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