What is RAR?

RAR is a general purpose archiving and compression program competing with/replacing programs such as PKZip, ARJ and others. RAR offers significantly improved compression ratios, easier use and a cheaper price as well as supporting long file names, disk spanning and self-extracting file creation.

RAR introduces an original compression algorithm. It allows higher compression ratios than other PC archiving tools, especially on executable files, Object libraries, large text files, etc.

RAR offers an optional, compression algorithm highly optimized for multimedia data.

RAR offers new facilities and features such as a full-screen interactive interface utilizing mouse and menus as well as the command line interface.

RAR provides functionality for creating a 'solid' archive, which can raise the compression ratio by 10% - 50% over more common methods, particularly when packing large numbers of small files.

RAR gives the user, using the full-screen mode, the ability to manage non-RAR archives (.ZIP, .ARJ, .LZH). The user may view update, transform to self-extracting (SFX) archive, add and erase comments, specify temporary work directory, etc.

RAR offers the ability to create and change SFX archives using default and external SFX modules.

RAR offers a number of service functions, such as setting a password, adding archive and file comments. Even physically damaged archives may be repaired and an archive may be locked to prevent further changes. Authenticity information may be added for additional security and RAR will store information on the last update and name of the archive.

RAR provides ANSI esc-sequence support in comments. This allows color comments and other ANSI features without the need for an ANSI-driver.