28 Years Later, Windows Finally Supports RAR Files (techcrunch.com) 110
An anonymous reader shares a report: Then, at some point, someone at Microsoft must have gotten fed up with rushing their .rar operations the way I have for 20 years and thought, there must be a better way. And so, under the subheading of "Reducing toil," we have a few helpful UI updates, then casually and apropos of nothing, this:
"In addition... We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project. You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows."
"In addition... We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project. You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows."
Devastating... (Score:5, Funny)
Winrar's massive revenue stream from all those registered users is going to dry up now.
Not anytime soon. (Score:3)
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Here is another good one, can't use an "em dash" or "—" in a filename when putting it into a compressed folder. Found that one out the other day. 7-Zip couldn't have cared less about that.
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Older versions of the ZIP file specification use the computer's local codepage, so anything outside that codepage gets mangled. You also can't extract archives with filenames from a different codepage, without the names getting screwed up.
Later versions seem to support Unicode, but it's rare for those versions to be used. Initially RAR was preferred for better compression and Unicode support, but for at least a decade 7-zip has been the one to use.
That said, Unicode itself is broken, so sometimes even with
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For well over 10 years after that I was still seeing WinZip installed on people's computers.
Voluntarily? Or was it just Dell's OEM bloat that people never got around to uninstalling?
Okay jokes aside, no Microsoft to this day doesn't support many ZIP options, e.g. AES-256 encryption isn't supported, something Winzip did literally 20 years ago, introduced literally in May 2003.
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The Windows native support for zip only offered the bare minimum of functionality, and it was brutally slow. WinZip had to be like an order of magnitude faster.
WinZip's also has way better compatibility than most alternatives. I've always had issues when sending people zip files encrypted with anything other than WinZip.
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Re:Devastating... (Score:4, Insightful)
I had a winrar license back in the day.
I hope the guy retired a few years ago though...
RAR registration data.
Single PC usage license
UID=499fcf21d36c4103f2bd
6412212250f2bd98da18c4430e03421ffee3827e9abd9fe0d05f82
84e9232d73300bdcd5d06035c6ab9048e2c5c62f0238f183d28519
aa87488bf38f5b634cf28190bdf438ac593b1857cdb55a7fcb0eb0
c3e4c2736090b3dfa45384e08e9de05c586032c8cbc4c69608db85
15cd75a971559d635677e969240f8516e1c96758510f912d196f04
eaa3693cac073e36f7cb8fb7a95dd1b284badfba8d19521160cc54
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so if anything it'll increase his sales as people pay to avoid whatever Microsoft has done to screw it up.
You live in a fantasy world where people actually care enough about this stuff. If someone hadn't bought an RAR license before, they won't do it now either.
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I had to tell them to stop because they all used the same pirated copy of winrar that was infested with some sort of virus and it kept trying to infect my users' machines.
Bloody idiots couldn't engineer properly either. Everything arrived slightly the wrong size. (Something like that. The CEO of our company was Chinese too and everyon
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Except they are all lifetime licenses.
ENVY is a Deadly Sin (Score:1)
Better late than never, I suppose (Score:3)
They should have bought WinRAR long ago - it has Win right in the name!
28 years later... (Score:2)
Re: 28 years later... (Score:2)
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Even people who do that may not have noticed that rar was involved. Usenet clients will generally unrar invisibly.
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Even people who do that may not have noticed that rar was involved. Usenet clients will generally unrar invisibly.
Not 28 years ago!
Re: 28 years later... (Score:5, Funny)
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uudecoding gigantic files was fun.
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...I still don't know what a RAR file is!
Well, at least you'll be comfortable not knowing what you've been missing out on. I mean, they do say ignorance is bliss. Might as well enjoy it I guess. - Every Usenet user ever.
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It's T-Rex p0rn.
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Back in the eighties and early nineties there used to be dozens of archive formats. ar, ark, arj, arc, dar, tar, zip, zoo, hog, lha, lhz, lzh, lzx, shar, pac, pak, cab, car, sda, sea, sfx, the list just went on and on.
The only ones you really need to know about at this point are zip and tar, special-purpose variants of zip and tar (e.g., jar and deb, respectively), and disk/filesystem images. The rest is noise. If anybody sends you an archive in one of the mor
gz is the actual interesting bit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: gz is the actual interesting bit (Score:4, Informative)
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File splitting used to be a necessity back in the days of USENET. Yes Im showing my age.
Oh the days of seeing six listings which had to be downloaded then stitched together to see something useful.
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Re: gz is the actual interesting bit (Score:2)
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File splitting used to be a necessity back in the days of USENET. Yes Im showing my age.
You might be showing your age, but you're not exactly demonstrating irrelevance.
Usenet is still around for the same damn reason it was 20 years ago.
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But maybe not the same reason it was [nearly] 30 years ago..
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Same with dial-up BBSes. ;)
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TAR format doesn't provide random access. You need to completely parse the file just to get a listing of what's inside. It's a terrible format.
Re: gz is the actual interesting bit (Score:2)
It isn't terrible. It is perfect for tapes, or anything where you just need a full append or break.
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The format is literally for sequential data, Tape ARchive.
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But the ability to extract tarballs is useful because it's a very common format, the second most common archive format (after zip), substantially more common than
There are certain use cases where tar is a better choice than zip. Mostly these involve the nee
Re:gz is the actual interesting bit (Score:5, Interesting)
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We could call this technology Spoof.
Re: gz is the actual interesting bit (Score:2)
It is. RAR's specialties aren't super amazing today, though they still can pack jpgs pretty tight I think. By contrast tar and gz always require third party support (usually 7z).
Honestly though, if you need to compress (or heaven forbid put even a basic AES block cipher on it), you will be getting 7z or a friend anyways.
RAR is the de facto standard in China (Score:2)
By some quirk of history, everyone uses RAR archives by default in China. This is going to make life easier for anyone doing business with China.
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seriously rar is what you lead with there? gz and tar support is far more interesting and useful.
As a Windows user I have never come across a tar or a gz file relevant to the os. Gz and tar support are relevant to Linux, it's no surprise that they lead with RAR support. And we all know no self-respecting Slashdotter will be caught dead sullying the pure nature of Linux by daring to open a file destined to the God's own OS from the unclean M$ Windoze ;-)
Hell must have frozen over (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft is actually adding a feature to Windows that somebody wants!
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"Hell must have frozen over"
Someone in Redmond got tired of having to go to 7-Zip.
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Microsoft is actually adding a feature to Windows that somebody wants!
When the feature is a 20-year old free download, it's viewed about as much of a "feature" as a speed bump is to a monster truck.
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Indeed. It still is a dramatic deviation from their usual modus were they decide what users must want and it has nothing to do with the real users.
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Indeed. It still is a dramatic deviation from their usual modus were they decide what users must want and it has nothing to do with the real users.
Is it? Really? Perhaps the Windows 11 users will let you know how they feel about your "deviation"...in between ads served from the fucking Start menu.
Like you suggested originally...Hell might have already added snowballs to their menu.
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I did not say it was a general deviation or something to be expected to happen more often. Just that this actually helpful behavior was so rare it counts as a dramatic deviation.
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Yep, probably. And maybe start to only work on "Microsoft 7z format" as well. MS has to far managed to fuck _everything_ up and there is no reason to believe that will change.
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They added
Also, they added
native compression? (Score:1)
windows is not a disk operating system anymore. the old compression policies even while not being written in stone seemed to survive this long.....
Are long NTFS File Paths fixed in File Explorer ? (Score:3)
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I know, right? It's amazing anything works at all, ever, with that being a problem. Clearly it should have bubbled to the top as "must be fix immediately".
Re:Are long NTFS File Paths fixed in File Explorer (Score:4, Informative)
There's nothing to fix, it was a conscious design decision. That said it was absolutely "fixed" for you and is fully supported by Explorer and has been for 5 years already. You just need to enable it with a registry edit, because long file names can break 32bit applications.
If your file path is longer than 260 characters you're doing something wrong. It's an organising system, not a place to store the works of Shakespeare.
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If your file path is longer than 260 characters you're doing something wrong.
Yeah, like using OneDrive, which hits this limitation all the frickin time. Then you have to go through Teams or the SuckPoint web app.
Re: Are long NTFS File Paths fixed in File Explore (Score:2)
Tell that to Boost.org. Weâ(TM)re forever running in build problems with that, and the build failure messages arenâ(TM)t obvious. For our own build agents, weâ(TM)ve enabled long path support, but third parties seem to forget. The alternative is to build Boost from a short path off the root. And then also all our Python build scripts have to prepend \\?\ to all file paths on Windows too. Itâ(TM)s so annoying.
Re:Are long NTFS File Paths fixed in File Explorer (Score:5, Informative)
( Unless they have fixed it again in Windows 11, which I choose not to use. I don't believe they have. )
"If your file path is longer than 260 characters you're doing something wrong. It's an organising system, not a place to store the works of Shakespeare."
An "organising system" should be able to organise things in a hierarchy.
That hierarchy may have many levels.
The organising system should be able to handle many levels.
Which for a file system means long file *paths* ( we are NOT talking about file *names* here ).
For three decades, NTFS has been able to handle the long file paths required to handle those many levels.
For three decades, File Explorer has not.
It remains a bug, after three decades.
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That hierarchy may have many levels.
It may. But it shouldn't. Just because something is possible doesn't make it a good idea. Which leads us ultimately to:
It remains a bug, after three decades.
Assuming you're right and it is a problem, no one cares. Like literally no one. You're talking about a fundamental flaw in storing data on a system, and yet for 3 decades people have continued using Windows just fine. Wait!... *checks*. Yep this was posted from a Windows machine and it appears to be working fine.
No one fixes a "bug" that only one user complains about because they are too au
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If you think that is normal behavior, then you need help.
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No I'm calling people mentally ill for thinking something that *isn't a feature* is somehow a bug.
The fact my hatchback gets bogged if I drive it on a sand dune isn't a bug either. It's not a feature the car was designed for. Just because my car has 4 wheels doesn't mean it can drive on every surface. Just because NTFS has long file name support doesn't mean it needs to be supported by an OS. The OP is complaining about a "bug" in a "feature" that is specifically not supported and requires a user to manuall
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You're calling autism a mental illness?
Yeah, right. It isn't. Nor is it a term you have any business bandying around as an insult.
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"an issue that literally no one else has."
EVERYONE who has any knowledge of Windows knows EXACTLY the BUG I am talking about.
There are PAGES of discussion about it.
Writing demented nonsense like you do makes it very clear who here has a problem with discourse - and reality.
You need help.
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It's not a File Explorer issue, it's the Win32 API that enforces the 260 character path length limit. So all applications have the same limitation, because they all use the Win32 API. Even if File Explorer supported longer names, you probably wouldn't be able to open those files in any application anyway.
At this point it's probably impossible to fix without massive breakage. Many applications have the 260 character limit hard coded in, and would overrun their buffers if it was lifted.
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Try working with artists. They will use wordy filenames that vaguely describe the contents, which they'll put in folders that are also similarly wordy. Then when their "Current Work" folder gets a bit overwhelming, it all goes into another folder called "Current Work (Previous 2021)" and stuck another layer deep. Come back a year later and stuff they did in January is now 10 levels down. And I never used to care until I tried to copy it all onto ZFS and learned that it has a limited path length.
The absolute
Pirates (Score:1)
All of you that use RAR files are pirates!! I've never seen a RAR file used for anything other than piracy. A file with .rar extension on your file system is the same as being caught with a crack pipe.
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All of you that use RAR files are pirates!! I've never seen a RAR file used for anything other than piracy. A file with .rar extension on your file system is the same as being caught with a crack pipe.
"Yarrr! Use RARrrr! Arrghh!"
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OK, tell me how the pirates have detailed information on shipping logistics? They have to be getting detailed files on every ocean vessel transferred to them, most likely in .RAR format.
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I have seen driver updates from motherboard makers come as self-extracting rar files and a couple times I have seen them as actual rar files.
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I belive you've confused .rar with .arr
Re:Pirates (Score:4, Interesting)
I've used it for decades because of the recovery record ability. Way back when, adding 1-3% for a recovery record would ensure that if line noise or something caused a glitch with a modem transfer, the archive would still be useful after a repair. The old signed archive feature was nice, just to show that the archives were not tampered with (before we had more advanced ways to do this), and it has great segmenting abilities, which can be useful if one has a large FAT32 volume and wants to store a bunch of large files (greater than 4 GB) on that, and formatting ExFAT isn't an option.
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Seems suspicious (Score:2)
.ARJ (Score:2)
Bring back .ARJ files.
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Some fine-tuning with Kermit can almost get one to zmodem speeds, especially with sliding windows.
Makes me wish StuffIt Deluxe were still maintained by Smith Micro and actively used, because it used to be the go to utility for Macs, even offering binhex4 so one could FTP Mac .hqx files over a seven bit link.
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I remember HS/Link. Chatting and playing a little game while we could send files at each other. Using a data connection to do more than one thing at a time was amazing.
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Only adding so they can peek inside these too... (Score:5, Insightful)
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^This. Period. +1 Fucking Smart.
I have used RAR for20 years on Linux & Windows (Score:1)
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I have done some scripting to generate a pass phrase, encrypt the pass phrase via GnuPG and write it in a directory, then use that pass phrase to create a WinRAR archive with its encryption on. It isn't as secure as using GnuPG explicitly, but it saves a step because the archive written out is encrypted, and there isn't a need to have an unencrypted file area. For decryption, just open up the .asc file in the directory, get the pass phrase, plop it into WinRAR, and extract, and that can be automated as we
in soviet russia we rar you! (Score:2)
in soviet russia we rar you!
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Innovation (Score:2)
The innovation in Redmond just never stops, does it?
I mean, it slows to a glacial crawl, but it doesn't actually stop, right?
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It's a limit thing. You can get arbitrarily close, but you will never actually finish.
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They incorporated the Open Source library that has supported this and many more for years ... ...still playing catch up
Am I one of the few who finds RAR useful? (Score:5, Interesting)
Am I one of the few people who finds WinRAR a useful format still?
It has one use that it is really good at, and it is an archiver. For example, taking my year's taxes, archiving them with WinRAR, adding a recovery record and pass phrase for security, then throwing them into protected storage. What this gives me is a way to check for bit rot, and hopefully repair it, and pretty much no other program has this. I could use PAR, but it is nowhere as easy as just throwing stuff into a WinRAR file and having the single file have all the recovery records rather than multiple files.
This has worked for me for decades. Recently, I pulled out some burned CDs from antediluvian times with a multi-part archive, with a recovery record, and recovery volumes. All the CDs were readable so I was able to pull stuff off, and it was easy to do a verify to ensure that the data of them was not just present, but passed checksumming, so there was protection against bit rot. WinRAR 5 has improved the CRC to Blake2, which greatly helps detect corruption, but the previous CRC feature wasn't bad either... good enough to check for bit flips or other garbage in a file.
The archive segmentation has been very useful as well. For relatively small amounts of data like some documents, being able to create a multi-part archive with recovery volumes works well. Since WinRAR is so commonplace, almost anything can open the archive.
Scripting isn't bad either.
And yes... I have registered it (with a copy per machine.) I miss their old signature capability, but understand why it was removed. It isn't a flashy program, but has kept my data safe for decades (especially with recovery record functionality and checksumming), so for me, well worth the price of admission.
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I've had WinRAR's recovery volumes save my data at least a few times over the many years I used it. 7zip's interface could learn a few lessons from WinRAR's, too. 7zip typically gets a better compression ratio, but WinRAR's no slouch. With how cheap storage is this has kind of become moot, anyway, but still. hehe.
Hilarious (Score:2)
Way to keep up with the times, Richmond Genuses.
I've just been using 7Zip (Score:2)
Honestly, ever since 7-Zip has been available, I've used that - it's one of the first things I install when setting up a computer:
I was one of those weirdos who actually did pay for WinZip at least once .. way back when Windows had no built in Zip handling.
I'll probably keep using 7-zip as I like the UI and integration better than the way the built in windows Zip handling does - and I'm guessing windows built in rar will work just like zip does now.
late to the game as always (Score:1)
Citation needed! (Score:1)
Reference Article (Score:2)