Sometimes you need to extract rar files or rar them up for a variety of reasons, often because they have come to you from a Windows environment, and you will need a program which can deal with them. Unrar is useful for this and it can be used on its own at the command line, or in conjunction with a GUI such as Xarchiver. (Xarchiver will not work on rar files unless you install unrar as below).
Using unrar in Centos 6/RHEL is simply a matter of installing it from the rpmforge repo, so get that first.
$ sudo rpm -Uvh http://pkgs.repoforge.org/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.i686.rpm
Disable it with
$ sudo vi /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo
See Vi and Vim commands
Set enabled to '0' , now install unrar
$ sudo yum -y --enablerepo=rpmforge install unrar
Below are some example commands to unrar files, you will usually use 'x' or 'e' to extract, 'unrar -h' for more options.
$ unrar x <file_name>.rar Extract with full path
$ unrar e -kb <file_name>.rar (Keep broken)
$ unrar l <file_name>.rar list files inside
$ unrar e <file_name>.rar dump files excluding folders
For multiple rar files which are numbered (for example) .r00 .r01
.r02 etc, just start at the first file name and the others will automatically be extracted.
Below is a loop to unrar multiple files
$ for i in *.rar
do
mkdir "${i/.rar}"
cd "${i/.rar}"
unrar e "../$i"
cd ..
done
Install from source
If you prefer to install unrar from the vendors source
$ sudo su
# cd /usr/src ; wget http://www.rarlab.com/rar/unrarsrc-4.0.2.tar.gz ; tar xvfz unrarsrc-4.0.2.tar.gz ; cd unrar ; ln -s makefile.unix Makefile ; make clean ; make ; make install
But check the http path as it could alter over time.
For more repositories see repos page.
Labels: Centos 6, RHEL, Unrar