In this tutorial, we will learn some basic commands for handling rar formats under Ubuntu or Linux Mint. We will see how to use the terminal to compress and decompress rar files. We will also see how to compress large files and split them in small chunks using the rar compression.
1. Installing RAR
To be able to compress/decompress rar files under Ubuntu/Linux Mint, you need to install RAR packages with this command:
sudo apt-get install unrar rar
2. RAR Uses
- To extract the contents of a .rar file, run this command:
unrar e file.rar
or
rar e file.rar
- To extract an archive file and keep full path intact, run this command:
rar x folder.rar
- To compress a file into a rar file, run this command:
rar a file.rar file.ext
Replace ext with your file format you want to compress (txt, exe, avi, ogg, etc.)
- To compress a folder, run this command:
rar a -r folder.rar path/to/folder/
- To compress and split the file into fragments, run this command:
rar a -v20000 file.rar file.mp4
or
rar a -v20000 -vn file.rar file.mp4
The commands above will compress file.mp4 and split it into many files, each one has a size of about 20MB.
For more help about the use of the rar format, run this command:
man rar
