Winrar

• Introduction to WinRAR::

  
        WinRAR is a 32-bit Windows version of the RAR archiver - a powerful tool which allows you to create, manage and control archive files. There are several versions of RAR, for a number of operating environments: Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, DOS, OS/2, MacOS X.
  

• Versions :

  
  There are two versions of RAR for Windows:
  
  • · Version with graphical user interface - WinRAR.exe;
    
    
  • · Command line console (text mode) version - Rar.exe.
    

• WinRAR features :

  
  
  • · Complete support of RAR and ZIP 2.0 archives;
    
  • · Highly sophisticated, original compression algorithm;
    
  • · Special algorithms optimized for text, audio, graphics, 32-bit and 64-bit Intel executables compression;
    
  • · Shell interface including drag-and-drop facility and wizard;
    
  • · Command line interface;
    
  • · Non RAR archives (7Z, ACE, ARJ, BZ2, CAB, GZ, ISO, JAR, LZH, TAR, UUE, Z) management;
    
  • · Solid archiving, which can raise compression ratio by 10% - 50% over more common methods, particularly when packing a large number of small, similar files;
    
  • · Multivolume archives;
    
  • · Creation of self-extracting archives (also multivolume) using the default or optional SFX modules;
    
  • · Recovering physically damaged archives;
    
  • · Recovery volumes allowing to reconstruct missing parts of multivolume archives.
    
  • · Unicode support in file names;
    
  • · Other service functions, such as encryption, archive comments, error logging, etc.
    

• Limitation of WinRar :

  
  
  •       The number of files, which can be added to an archive, depends upon the amount of available memory and the length of file names. Roughly 128 bytes of memory are required per archived file for RAR archive. For example, it can take about 128 MB to compress one million of files. WinRAR has been tested to handle over one million of files.
    
  •       The size of a RAR archive, as well as the size of any single file within a RAR archive, is limited to 8,589,934,591 GB (9,223,372,036,854,775,807 bytes). Note that to create archives larger than 4 GB, you need to use NTFS, as older file systems do not support such large files.
    
  •       The size of a ZIP archive, as well as the size of any single file within a ZIP archive, is limited to 2 GB.
          In general RAR archive format is much better optimized for heavy tasks involving huge number of files and gigabytes of disk space.