3 ms·

RAR has some unique built-in characteristics like recovery record (useful when archiving on optical discs, or any other media which can degrade in time) and rec

RAR has some unique built-in characteristics like recovery record (useful when archiving on optical discs, or any other media which can degrade in time) and recovery volumes (which was a life-saver feature in the age of floppy disks).

digi_owl 11y ago
Another major contributor is likely that with rar you can make a multi-file self-extractor. Seem to recall that before broadband and torrents, many a pirated game was released as a split rar .exe that could fit on floppies and was spread across numerous upload sites. Dump them all in a dir, run the exe, and game on...
- oneweekwonder 11y ago
  I believe winzip had the same feature of creating a exe zip spanning over multiple files, for using on floppies.
  - soylentcola 11y ago
    I only remember using that feature when zipping something up myself and it would have you keep inserting floppies as needed. I'm sure you could then post images of the floppies for distribution but I never really saw that done. It was always .r00, .r01, etc on usenet.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    True, though i think the making scheme of rar was more helpful. Also, rar compressed various file formats (video and audio specifically) better.
- i336_ 11y ago
  7z can't do the exe bit I don't think, but it can make split archives of arbitrary size (in bytes).
  - toyg 11y ago
    Providing executable packages is a terrible practice anyway and should be discouraged. It reinforces the view that it's OK to execute random untrusted programs just to get a document, the most popular assumption abused by malware developers.
    - i336_ 11y ago
      I can't deny that that's true. It's inconvenient too, as nothing in this house runs Windows right now, and extracting custom fancy EXEs* can get annoying. (*: Most archivers can reopen the EXEs they create as par the course, and there are lots of extractors and unpackers out there, but I vaguely remember a few incidents where I wanted to extract an executable archive/installer of some kind and couldn't. In some cases pushing the EXE through Wine worked.)
pasbesoin 11y ago
Just what I was going to ask about. I thought WinRAR had the option to include parity checks / redundancy within the data. BTW, is there a current... "turnkey" (simple, "clicky"), I guess, *NIX solution for doing that within an archive?
- jakobdabo 11y ago
  There is this par2cmdline[1] tool which is (as the name suggests) a console program "for creating and using PAR2[2] files to detect damage in data files and repair them if necessary". GPar2[3] (alpha) is a simple GTK+ GUI for it. [1] - https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive [3] - https://github.com/Parchive/gpar2 https://github.com/Parchive/gpar2
- pgeorgi 11y ago
  If you want to build something like that, http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/utils/file/ras-1.03.tar.gz http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/utils/file/ras-1.03.tar.gz can provide the redundancy support.

digi_owl 11y ago

Another major contributor is likely that with rar you can make a multi-file self-extractor. Seem to recall that before broadband and torrents, many a pirated game was released as a split rar .exe that could fit on floppies and was spread across numerous upload sites. Dump them all in a dir, run the exe, and game on...

oneweekwonder 11y ago
I believe winzip had the same feature of creating a exe zip spanning over multiple files, for using on floppies.
- soylentcola 11y ago
  I only remember using that feature when zipping something up myself and it would have you keep inserting floppies as needed. I'm sure you could then post images of the floppies for distribution but I never really saw that done. It was always .r00, .r01, etc on usenet.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  True, though i think the making scheme of rar was more helpful. Also, rar compressed various file formats (video and audio specifically) better.
i336_ 11y ago
7z can't do the exe bit I don't think, but it can make split archives of arbitrary size (in bytes).
- toyg 11y ago
  Providing executable packages is a terrible practice anyway and should be discouraged. It reinforces the view that it's OK to execute random untrusted programs just to get a document, the most popular assumption abused by malware developers.
  - i336_ 11y ago
    I can't deny that that's true. It's inconvenient too, as nothing in this house runs Windows right now, and extracting custom fancy EXEs* can get annoying. (*: Most archivers can reopen the EXEs they create as par the course, and there are lots of extractors and unpackers out there, but I vaguely remember a few incidents where I wanted to extract an executable archive/installer of some kind and couldn't. In some cases pushing the EXE through Wine worked.)

pasbesoin 11y ago

Just what I was going to ask about. I thought WinRAR had the option to include parity checks / redundancy within the data. BTW, is there a current... "turnkey" (simple, "clicky"), I guess, *NIX solution for doing that within an archive?

jakobdabo 11y ago
There is this par2cmdline[1] tool which is (as the name suggests) a console program "for creating and using PAR2[2] files to detect damage in data files and repair them if necessary". GPar2[3] (alpha) is a simple GTK+ GUI for it. [1] - https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive [3] - https://github.com/Parchive/gpar2 https://github.com/Parchive/gpar2
pgeorgi 11y ago
If you want to build something like that, http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/utils/file/ras-1.03.tar.gz http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/utils/file/ras-1.03.tar.gz can provide the redundancy support.