How To Use RAR To Compress, Decompress, And Split Files From Terminal - Ubuntu/Linux Mint

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