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what's a .rar file?

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by jangeles Jan 11, 2003 last reply Feb 14, 2003

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I got a file with .rar extension. I think it is text but I do not know how to open it

7 replies

by dmiles Jan 11, 2003

This file is associated with Win RaR (like Win Zip) a file compression utility and file splitter
see the following
www.rarsoft.com/download.htm

by jangeles Feb 14, 2003

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by alpha-male Jan 12, 2003

The .rar format is the output of an archiving program that splits up large files into many smaller, compressed files. Posts in the multimedia groups are sometimes in this format and it is frequently used in the MP3 groups.

A shareware program called WinRAR is used to re-combine all the parts once you download them.
You can download it at www.rarlab.com

When you find a group of .rar files you are interested in, make sure that all the .r0* files exist before you start downloading them. You will need the .rar file and the .r00 through .rnn files to decompress the entire archive. If a RAR archive is split into more than 100 chunks, the file extension continues to .s00 through .s99 and then .t00 through .t99. Each piece of a .rar series will all be the exact same size except the .rar file itself, and the last one in the series, which will be smaller. So if you find a 15 part RAR archive, you will see a .rar, the .r00 through .r14 all being the same size, and a .r15 which will be smaller (or possibly the same size if it happened to be an even multiple of the file size but this is rare).

Good luck...hope this helps!