v6.21 [Mar 14, 2012]
- 1. Both file and folder modification timestamps are restored when unpacking TAR and TAR based archives like tar.gz and tar.bz2. Previously only file modification timestamps were set for these archive formats.
- 2. Added decompression of .tar.zst archives with dictionary exceeding 128 MB. WinRAR 6.20 allowed such dictionary for .zst, but not for .tar.zst.
- 3. Switches -ed and -e d are also supported by ZIP archives. Previously they worked only for RAR archives.
- 4. Bugs fixed:
- If unencrypted file was stored after encrypted in the same RAR archive and both files had been unpacked in the same extraction command, WinRAR 6.20 failed to unpack the unencrypted file;
- In some cases a wrong detailed reason of file open error could be displayed in the second line of open error message.
v6.2 [May 18, 2021]
- If Zone.Identifier alternate NTFS stream, also known as Mark of the Web, is present both in archived office document file and host archive, WinRAR sets a stream with more restricted security zone to unpacked file. Previous beta always preferred the archive security zone if it was "Internet" or "Restricted sites".
- "Archive" page in archive properties in Windows Explorer:
a) "Original name" and "Original time" field names are not displayed anymore for non-RAR archives;
b) the compression dictionary size is displayed also for non-RAR archives when available.
- Bugs fixed:
a) if "Launch folder windows in a separate process" Windows Explorer option was enabled in Windows 11 22H2, in some cases WinRAR context menu items didn't perform any action on a click;
b) WinRAR could read data beyond the end of buffer and crash when unpacking files from specially crafted ZIP archive. We are thankful to Bakker working with Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative for letting us know about this bug.
v6.1.7600.16385 [Jul 19, 2012]
- WinRAR can unpack contents of .zst and .zipx archives utilizing Zstandard algorithm.
- Added support of Windows 11 Explorer context menus. Beginning from Windows 11, an application can add only a single top level command or submenu to Explorer context menu. If "Cascaded context menus" in "Integration settings" dialog is on, this single item is a submenu storing all necessary WinRAR commands. If this option is off, only one extraction command for archives and one archiving command for usual files are available. You can select these commands with "Context menu items..." button in "Integration settings" dialog.
- "Legacy context menus" option in "Settings/Integration" dialog can be used in Windows 11 if WinRAR commands are missing in "Show more options" Windows legacy context menu or in context menus of third party file managers. If WinRAR commands are already present here, keep "Legacy context menus" option turned off to prevent duplicating them. This option is not available in Windows 10 and older.
- Windows XP is not supported anymore. Minimum required operating system version is Windows Vista.
- "Close" item is added to "When done" list on "Advanced" page of archiving dialog. It closes WinRAR window, when archiving is done.
- "When done" list is added to "Options" page of extraction dialog. It allows to select an action like turning a computer off or closing WinRAR after completing extraction.
- Switch -si can be used when extracting or testing to read archive data from stdin, such as: type docs.rar | rar x -si -o -pmypwd dummy docs\. Even though the archive name is ignored with this switch, an arbitrary dummy archive name has to specified in the command line. Operations requiring backward seeks are unavailable in this mode. It includes displaying archive comments, testing the recovery record, utilizing the quick open information, processing multivolume archives. Prompts requiring user interaction are not allowed. Use -o[ |-|r], -p or -mes switches to suppress such prompts.
- New -ep4 switch excludes the path prefix when archiving or extracting if this path is found in the beginning of archived name. Path is compared with names already prepared to store in archive, without drive letters and leading path separators. For example: rar a -ep4texts\books archive c:\texts\books\technical. removes "text\books" from archived names, so they start from 'technical'.
- New -mes switch skips encrypted files when extracting or testing. It replaces the former -p- switch.
- New -op switch sets the destination folder for 'x' and 'e' extraction commands. Unlike command line parameter, this switch also accepts paths without trailing path separator character.
- If 'p' command is used to print a file to stdout, informational messages are suppressed automatically to prevent them mixing with file data.
- "Generate archive name by mask" option and switch -ag treat only first two 'M' characters after 'H' as minutes. Previously any amount of such characters was considered as minutes. It makes possible to place the time field before the date, like -agHHMM-DDMMYY. Previous versions considered all 'M' in this string as minutes.
- Maximum allowed size of RAR5 recovery record is increased to 1000% of protected data size. Maximum number of RAR5 recovery volumes can be 10 times larger than protected RAR volumes. Previous WinRAR versions are not able to use the recovery record to repair broken archives if recovery record size exceeds 99%. Similarly, previous versions cannot use recovery volumes if their number is equal or larger than number of RAR volumes.
- Warning is issued if entered password exceeds the allowed limit of 127 characters and is truncated. Previously such passwords had been truncated silently.
- If archive includes reserved device names, the underscore character is inserted in the beginning of such names when extracting. For example, aux.txt is converted to _aux.txt. It is done to prevent compatibility problems with software unable to process such names. You can use "Allow potentially incompatible names" option in "Advanced" part of extraction dialog or command line -oni switch to avoid this conversion.
- WinRAR attempts to reset the file cache before testing an archive. It helps to verify actual data written to disk instead of reading a cached copy.
- Multiple -v switches specifying different sizes for different volumes are now allowed also for ZIP archives: WinRAR a -v100k -v200k -v300k arcname.zip. Previously multiple -v switches were supported only for RAR archives.
- Switches -sl and -sm can be used in WinRAR.exe command line mode when extracting archives in any supported formats, provided that such archive includes unpacked file sizes. Previously these switches could filter files by size only in RAR and ZIP archives.
v6.1 [Mar 6, 2021]
- "Legacy context menus" option in "Settings/Integration" dialog can be used in Windows 11 if WinRAR commands are missing in "Show more options" Windows legacy context menu or in context menus of third party file managers. If WinRAR commands are already present here, keep "Legacy context menus" option turned off to prevent duplicating them. This option is not available in Windows 10 and older.
- Added extraction of .zst archives starting from so called skippable frame with user defined data. Previous beta versions supported .zst archives only with standard frame in the beginning.
- Improved the precision of extraction progress for RAR5 archives with large recovery record.
- Bugs fixed:
- There was a memory leak when unpacking data in XZ format.
- "Delete archive" extraction option failed to delete .zx## parts of multipart .zipx archive.
- An excessive trailing colon was displayed in "lt" command output for numeric Unix owner and group information.
v6.0.2900.2180 [Feb 17, 2012]
- "Ignore" and "Ignore All" options are added to read error prompt. "Ignore" allows to continue processing with already read file part only and "Ignore All" does it for all future read errors. For example, if you archive a file, which portion is locked by another process, and if "Ignore" is selected in read error prompt, only a part of file preceding the unreadable region will be saved into archive. It can help to avoid interrupting lengthy archiving operations, though be aware that files archived with "Ignore" are incomplete. If switch -y is specified, "Ignore" is applied to all files by default. Previously available "Retry" and "Quit" options are still present in read error prompt as well.
- Exit code 12 is returned in the command line mode in case of read errors. This code is returned for all options in the read error prompt, including a newly introduced "Ignore" option. Previously more common fatal error code 2 was returned for read errors.
- If several archives are selected, "Extract archives to" option group in "Options" page of extraction dialog can be used to place extracted files to specified destination folder, to separate subfolders in destination folder, to separate subfolders in archive folders and directly to archive folders. It replaces "Extract archives to subfolders" option and available only if multiple archives are selected.
- New -ad2 switch places extracted files directly to archive's own folder. Unlike -ad1, it does not create a separate subfolder for each unpacked archive.
- "Additional switches" option in "Options" page of archiving and extraction dialogs allows to specify WinRAR command line switches. It might be useful if there is no option in WinRAR graphical interface matching a switch. Use this feature only if you are familiar with WinRAR command line syntax and clearly understand what specified switches are intended for.
- Compression parameters in "Benchmark" command are changed to 32 MB dictionary and "Normal" method. They match RAR5 default mode and more suitable to estimate the typical performance of recent WinRAR versions than former 4 MB "Best" intended for RAR4 format. Latest "Benchmark" results cannot be compared with previous versions directly. New parameters set produces different values, likely lower because of eight times larger dictionary size.
- When unpacking a part of files from solid volume set, WinRAR attempts to skip volumes in the beginning and start extraction from volume closest to specified file and with reset solid statistics. By default WinRAR resets the solid statistics in the beginning of large enough solid volumes where possible. For such volumes extracting a part of files from the middle of volume set can be faster now. It does not affect performance when all archived files are unpacked.
- Previously WinRAR automatically resorted to extracting from first volume, when user started extraction from non-first volume and first volume was available. Now WinRAR does so only if all volumes between first and specified are also available.
- Warning is issued when closing WinRAR if one or more archived files had been modified by external apps, but failed to be saved back to archive, because an external app still locks them. Such warning includes the list of modified files and proposes to quit immediately and lose changes or return to WinRAR and close an editor app. Previous versions issued a similar warning while editing a file, but did not remind it again when quitting.
- "Move to Recycle Bin" option in "Delete archive" options group of extraction dialog places deleted archives to Recycle Bin instead of deleting them permanently.
- New "Clear history..." command in "Options" menu allows to remove names of recently opened archives in "File" menu and clear drop down lists with previously entered values in dialogs. For example, these values include archive names in archiving dialog and destination paths in extraction dialog.
- "File time" options in "Advanced" part of extraction dialog are now available for 7z archives. Additionally to modification time, WinRAR can set creation and last access time when unpacking such archives.
- ""New" submenu items" options group is added to "Settings/Integration/Context menu items..." dialog. You can use these options to remove "WinRAR archive" and "WinRAR ZIP archive" entries in "New" submenu of Windows context menu. New state of these option is applied only after you press "OK" both in "Context menu items" and its parent "Settings" dialog.
- <Max>, <Min> and <Hide> commands can be inserted before the program name in SFX "Setup" command to run a program in maximized, minimized or hidden window. For example: Setup=<Hide>setup.exe
v5.90.90.4 [Feb 9, 2012]
- Dialogs are centered inside of WinRAR window similarly to WinRAR 5.80 and not inside of entire screen as in WinRAR 5.90.
- When editing an archived file with external software, extra measures are taken to reduce the probability of interfering with editor and opening its temporary files while editor still may need them.
- "Version to extract" field in archive properties opened from Windows Explorer context menu provides the additional information about ZIP compression and encryption algorithms, such as LZMA or AES. This information was already available in WinRAR "Info" command, but missed in archive information accessible from Windows Explorer.
- "MS DOS" and "Unix" host OS types are recognized and included for LZH archives in "Info" command. Previously the host OS field was always "Unknown" for LZH archive format.
- Files created by external editor and matching "Settings/Viewer/Ignore modifications for" masks are never added to archive. Previously WinRAR still added them if some file not matching these masks was also created or modified.
- Bugs fixed:
- Empty file names were displayed inside of some Unix LZH archives.
- WinRAR could not process more than 999 7z volumes in a single set.
- If user cancelled the user account control prompt after changing "Integrate WinRAR into shell" option, a new state of this option was displayed in "Settings" dialog, even though the actual state of shell integration was not modified.
- The main window size could be too small on the first run after clean install with no previous WinRAR version present.
- WinRAR could stop responding after editing an archived file with external software in Windows 10 version 2004.
v5.71 [Dec 29, 2012]
- "Convert archives" command:
- Improved performance when processing a lot of small archives in Windows 10.
- Fixed memory leaks which could lead to excessive memory use when converting to ZIP format.
- Corrupt ZIP archive processing:
- "Repair" command replaces packed and unpacked file sizes stored in local file header with sizes from central directory if local header sizes look invalid.
- File extraction is stopped at unpacked size stored in ZIP headers even if available packed data allows further extraction. It is done to prevent unexpected hard drive space usage.
- Ctrl C allows to abort RAR "l" command quickly. In previous versions it could take several seconds until list command stopped.
- Bugs fixed:
- WinRAR could crash when attempting to display some types of archive comments in GUI shell, resulting in a denial of service.
- If "Save archive name" and "Add to context menu" options were set in compression profile parameters and profile was invoked from Explorer context menu, WinRAR proposed an automatically generated archive name instead of name saved in profile.
- WinRAR displayed an unneeded pair of round brackets in "Archive" column of "Diagnostic messages" window for system error messages.
- "Extract to folder\" Windows Explorer context menu command could fail to unpack ZIP archives if their names included a numeric part followed by .zip extension, arbitrary data was present before the first file record and "Remove redundant folders from extraction path" WinRAR option was switched on.
- In "RAR x -x<mask> arcname" command, parent folders of files matching the specified mask also were excluded from extracting.
- "Find" command returned the current folder own name additionally to its contents for "Current folder" search area if folder name matched "File names to find" mask.
- If "Find in files" and "Find in archives" are both enabled, "Find" command did not match an archive name itself against "File names to find" mask after searching inside of archive. So it did not display archive names for masks like *.rar and applied this mask only to files inside of archives.
- When running an executable directly from archive, WinRAR 5.70 did not set a temporary folder with unpacked files as current. So executables attempting to access other archived files in current folder could fail to work.
- WinRAR could be inaccessible for few seconds after closing an archived file opened in internal viewer in Windows 10.
- Dragging a file to subfolder of ZIP archive with "Store full paths" option enabled produced invalid pathnames consisting of repeated subfolder name. Same invalid pathnames were produced if adding files to ZIP archive with -ap<folder> -ep2 switches.
v5.61.1 [Dec 6, 2013]
- We updated WinRAR graphics.
- "Repair" command efficiency is improved for recovery record protected RAR5 archives. Now it can detect deletions and insertions of unlimited size also as shuffled data including data taken from several recovery record protected archives and merged into a single file in arbitrary order.
- "Turn PC off when done" archiving option is changed to "When done" drop-down list, so you can turn off, hibernate or sleep your PC after completing archiving.
- Use -ioff or -ioff1 command line switch to turn PC off, -ioff2 to hibernate and -ioff3 to sleep your PC after completing an operation.
- If encoding of comment file specified in -z switch is not defined with -sc switch, RAR attempts to detect UTF-8, UTF-16LE and UTF-16BE encodings based on the byte order mask and data validity tests.
- WinRAR attempts to detect ANSI, OEM and UTF-8 encodings of ZIP archive comments automatically.
- "Internal viewer/Use DOS encoding" option in "Settings/Viewer" is replaced with "Internal viewer/Autodetect encoding". If "Autodetect encoding" is enabled, the internal viewer attempts to detect ANSI (Windows), OEM (DOS), UTF-8 and UTF-16 encodings.
- Normally Windows Explorer context menu contains only extraction commands if single archive has been right clicked. You can override this by specifying one or more space separated masks in "Always display archiving items for" option in Settings/Integration/Context menu items", so archiving commands are always displayed for these file types even if file was recognized as archive. If you wish both archiving and extraction commands present for all archives, place "*" here.
- SFX module "SetupCode" command accepts an optional integer parameter allowing to control mapping of setup program and SFX own error codes. It is also accessible as "Exit code adjustment" option in "Advanced SFX options/Setup" dialog.
- New "Show more information" WinRAR command line -im switch. It can be used with "t" command to issue a message also in case of successful archive test result. Without this switch "t" command completes silently if no errors are found. This switch is applicable only to WinRAR.exe and ignored by console RAR.exe.
- If a wrong password is entered when unpacking an encrypted file in ZIP archive, WinRAR proposes to enter a valid password for same file again instead of aborting extraction.
- If a wrong password is entered when opening or unpacking RAR archive with encrypted file names, WinRAR proposes to enter a valid password again instead of aborting the operation. Previous versions already did so for RAR archives with encrypted file data, but aborted for archives with file name encryption.
- WinRAR recognizes GZIP files with arbitrary data preceding an actual GZIP archive, such as .scexe firmware files.
- @filelist parameter can be specified in "Files to add" field of archiving dialog. In this case WinRAR will attempt the list of archiving files from 'file list' file, which should be the plain text, one file name per line.
- Info dialog: a) compression ratio graph is updated; b) "Names and data" is displayed in "Encryption" field for archives with encrypted file names.
- Full archive name is displayed if mouse pointer is placed over an archive name in the operation progress window. It can be useful if archive name is lengthy and does not fit to available window space.
- If -ts1 switch is used with -u or -f, file time comparison is performed with 1 second precision. Previosuly in such case we could wrongly treat an adding file as newer than archived just because we compared the high precision adding file time against the low precision archived file time.
- "Update" and "Fresh" commands ('u' and 'f' in the command line mode) quit immediately if no files are to be updated. Previously they created a temporary archive before quitting when updating archives with recovery record or quick open information.
- Prompt is issued after creating 500 volumes from WinRAR GUI shell, so user can continue or quit further archiving. It is done to prevent creating many thousands of volumes in case of wrongly entered volume size.
- WinRAR uses megabytes instead of bytes as default units for volume size field in the archiving dialog.
- "Repair" command issues "Recovery record is corrupt" message after repairing RAR5 archive containing a broken recovery record. Previously such message was issued only by "Test" command and "Repair" handled most of recovery record damages silently.
- Bugs fixed.
v5.40.4 [May 12, 2016]
1. "Name encoding" submenu in "Options" menu allows to select encoding for archived file names. This selection affects archive browsing and extraction commands. You can use Ctrl+E keyboard shortcut to access this menu quickly.
It can be useful when unpacking an archive without Unicode file names. For example, unpacking a zip file with Chinese archived names in Windows with Russian specified as a language for non-Unicode programs.
2. If RAR recovery volumes (.rev files) are present in the same folder as usual RAR volumes, archive test command verifies .rev contents after completing testing .rar files.
If you wish to test only .rev files without checking .rar volumes, you can select .rev files in WinRAR file list and apply "Test" only to them or run:
rar t arcname.part1.rev
in the command line.
3. While NTFS file system permits file names with trailing spaces and dots, a lot of Windows programs fail to process such names correctly. If "Allow potentially incompatible names" option in "Advanced" page of extraction dialog is turned off, WinRAR removes trailing spaces and dots, if any, from file names when extracting.
This option is turned off by default.
Command line RAR also removes trailing spaces and dots when extracting unless -oni switch is specified.
4. Previously "Synchronize archive contents" update mode (-as command line switch) aborted if some of archiving folders could not be read. Now WinRAR continues performing the operation and preserves archived files matching unreadable folders.
5. WinRAR Shift+Del delete command can be used to delete folders containing non-standard file names with trailing spaces and dots. Usual delete to Recycle Bin also as Shift+Del in previous WinRAR versions cannot delete such folders.
Unlike Del command, Shift+Del removes files permanently, they are not moved to Recycle Bin. No additional prompts are issued for files with read-only and system attributes.
6. You can drag folders from folder tree panel and drop them to other programs or Desktop to copy or unpack them. Drag the archive icon in tree panel root to unpack the entire archive.
7. "New folder" button in extraction dialog proposes a new folder name based on archive name instead of generic "New Folder".
8. Command line RAR version information:
a) if -iver switch is specified, RAR displays the version number and quits. You can run just "RAR -iver";
b) "x86" or "x64" is displayed in Windows RAR version information both for -iver and in the copyright title for other commands.
9. If -p switch is used without optional parameter, a password can be also set with file redirection or pipe.
For example: rar -p myarc.rar myfiles < psw.txt
10. Command line RAR treats 'arcname.partN' as 'arcname.partN.rar' if 'arcname.partN' does not exist and 'arcname.part#.rar' exists.
For example, it is allowed to run:
RAR x arcname.part01
to start extraction from arcname.part01.rar
11. Improvements in 7z archives support:
a) "Solid" status is correctly detected and reported for 7z archives in WinRAR "Info" command;
b) dictionary size is displayed for LZMA and LZMA2 7z archives in WinRAR "Info" command;
c) unknown packed size for files inside of 7z solid block is denoted as '?' instead of '0' when browsing the archive contents in WinRAR.
12. Maximum comment length for RAR archives is increased from 64 to 256 KB.
Since SFX script commands are stored in archive comment, it allows a longer main and license text in SFX archives.
13. Size of default WinRAR viewer font is scaled up properly in Windows high DPI mode.
14. Switch -scul can be used to process big endian UTF-16 list files as well, provided that they have a correct byte order mark.
Previously it allowed only little endian file lists.
15. Minimum supported Windows version is Windows XP SP3 now. WinRAR will not run in Windows XP without service packs.
16. "Settings/File list/Allow all uppercase names" option is removed. This option was intended to simplify transition from MS DOS to Windows and is not needed anymore.
17. Bugs fixed:
a) WinRAR 5.31 x64 "Compress and email" command did not work with Microsoft Outlook x64;
b) if WinRAR 5.31 version for one of right to left languages was installed in Windows with English or other not right to left system language, WinRAR could change Windows Explorer layout to right to left;
c) if archive was stored in a folder without "Write" permission and if archive contents was extracted with drag and drop to a writable folder, WinRAR issued an unnecessary privileges elevation prompt.
v5.31.1 [Jul 20, 2015]
1. Information about the critical vulnerability in WinRAR self-extracting archives published in news in September and October 2015 is incorrect. Unfortunately mass media failed to recognize that what was described as WinRAR vulnerability is Windows OLE vulnerability patched in November 2014:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms14-064.aspx
Even if unpatched, this Windows OLE vulnerability does not introduce new risk factors for WinRAR SFX archives.
Please read http://rarlab.com/vuln_sfx_html2.htm for more details.
No patches for WinRAR are needed.
2. Added extraction of multipart ZIP archives created by 7-Zip. Such archives have .zip.001, .zip.002, ... file extensions. You need to open .zip.001 file in WinRAR shell to browse or unpack such archive. All parts must be stored in the same folder before starting extraction.
3. Added extraction of files split to multiple parts with .001, .002, ..., extensions. You can open .001 file as a usual archive and then unpack its contents. WinRAR will combine all parts and save them to extracted file. All parts must be stored in the same folder before starting extraction.
"001" item is included to "Associate WinRAR with" list in "Settings/Integration" dialog.
4. WinRAR file list allows to use mouse Back and Forward buttons or Alt+Left and Alt+Right keyboard shortcuts to navigate in recently visited folders.
5. Folder wildcards are allowed in RAR command line in file names to archive. For example:
rar a backup c:\backup\2015*\*
will archive all '2015*' folders in c:\backup. Use -r switch to search for '2015*' also in c:\backup subfolders.
6. "Extract" button in SFX archive is changed to "Pause" when extraction is started, so it is possible to pause SFX extraction and resume it later.
7. "Skip encrypted" option in "Find files" dialog to silently skip encrypted archives while performing search command.
8. Archive test command works for tar.gz, tar.bz2 and tar.xz archives. Since TAR format does not provide file data checksums, WinRAR checks only validity of GZIP, BZIP2 or XZ container.
9. Adding a new string to WinRAR diagnostic messages window could be slow and affect the operation performance in case of thousands of errors. Now it works fast regardless of errors number.
10. New 'R' object for -sc switch defines encoding of console RAR messages sent to redirected files and pipes. For example:
rar lb -scur data > list.txt
will produce Unicode list.txt with archived file names.
11. Sleep time parameter in -ri[:] switch is adjusted to lower its impact to RAR performance and especially to recovery record related operations. Higher sleep time values are needed to reduce the system load to same level as in previous versions.
12. Console RAR "l" and "v" commands display file time in YYYY-MM-DD format.
13. When extracting RAR and ZIP archives created in Unix, WinRAR maps decomposed Unicode characters to precomposed. Such conversion is required for some Unix and OS X archives to correctly unpack non-English archived names in Windows. It works for Windows versions starting from Windows Vista.
14. Modification time is set for all folders created when unpacking .7z archives. Previous versions set it only for non-empty folders.
15. WinRAR prevents a computer to go to sleep by inactivity timeout until current operation, such as archiving, extraction or another archive processing, is done.
16. Total progress bar is displayed when extracting .arj, .lzh and .cab archives (except multivolume archives).
17. Progress bar is displayed when deleting files after archiving and when clearing "Archive" attribute of archived files.
18. "Test" command also verifies contents of NTFS alternate data streams in RAR 3.x - 5.x archives. Previously their contents was checked only during extraction command.
19. SFX module sets sfxstime environment variable, which contains the module start time in "YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS-ms" format. You can specify it in Path command if you need to generate a time based unique installation path, such as "Path=myapp-%sfxstime%".
20. Bugs fixed:
a) console RAR crashed instead of displaying an overwrite prompt when attempting to add files to already existing volumes;
b) console RAR "lt" command did not display seconds in file timestamp;
c) WinRAR failed to decompress .xxe files if they did not include "section N of xxencode" string in the body;
d) WinRAR could not restore contents of NTFS alternate data stream saved with -os switch if it was split between different volumes.
v5.31.1 [Jul 19, 2015]
Version 5.30 beta 4
1. It is allowed to specify environment variables in path to external
viewer in WinRAR "Settings/Viewer" dialog.
2. Folder wildcards behavior is changed, so command like:
rar a backup c:\backup\2015*\*
will search for '2015*' folders only in c:\backup. Add -r switch
if you wish to search also in all c:\backup subfolders.
3. If wrong password is specified when extracting an encrypted file
in RAR5 archive, WinRAR will not create folders contained in file path.
Previous versions created file path folders even if file extraction
failed because of wrong password.
This change does not affect RAR 4.x format, which does not allow
to verify password validity before starting file extraction.
4. Bugs fixed:
a) "Delete files after archiving" option of default compression
profile was ignored in drag&drop operations in previous beta.
v5.21.2 [Mar 3, 2012]
1. "Drag and drop context menu" options in "Settings/Integration/Context menu items" dialog allow to disable WinRAR archiving and extraction commands in context menu displayed after dragging and dropping files with right mouse button.
2. If winrar.ini file is present in the same folder as WinRAR installer, winrar.ini will be copied to WinRAR program folder after completing installation.
3. While previous versions could produce RAR5 volumes of slightly smaller than requested size sometimes, such situation is less likely now. In most cases volume size equals to specified by user.
4. Now by default WinRAR skips symbolic links with absolute paths in link target when extracting. You can enable creating such links with "Allow absolute paths in symbolic links" option on "Advanced" page of extraction dialog or with -ola command line switch.
Such links pointing to folders outside of extraction destination folder can present a security risk. Enable their extraction only if you are sure that archive contents is safe, such as your own backup.
5. Bugs fixed:
a) WinRAR 5.20 issued unnecessary user account control (UAC) prompt, when running an executable from archive stored in UAC protected folder. Since nothing is extracted to folder containing an archive in such case, UAC prompt is not needed;
b) WinRAR could overwrite files with read-only attribute only when unpacking RAR and ZIP archive formats. Now it is also implemented for other archive formats supported by WinRAR;
c) "Elapsed time" and "Time left" were displayed incorrectly when applying "Convert" command to multiple archives and enabling "Add recovery record" option.
v5.11.1 [Feb 10, 2012]
1. Added extraction support for ZIP and ZIPX archives using
BZIP2, LZMA and PPMd compression.
2. Added extraction support for 7z split archives
(.7z.001, .7z.002, ...).
3. Added support for AES-NI CPU instructions allowing to improve
RAR encryption and decryption performance.
4. Default theme images are scaled up with better quality
in high DPI display mode.
5. Environment variables, such as %temp%, can be used
in "Files to add" field of archiving dialog.
6. Switch -ai can be used when creating RAR archive,
so predefined values, typical for file and folder,
are stored instead of actual attributes.
Previously this switch could be used only when extracting.
v5.01.1 [Aug 19, 2012]
Version 5.00
1. New RAR 5.0 archiving format. You can use "RAR 5.0" option
in archiving dialog or -ma command line switch to create
RAR 5.0 archives.
2. Changes in RAR 5.0 compression algorithm:
a) maximum compression dictionary size is increased up to 1 GB
in 64 bit WinRAR.
b) default dictionary size for RAR 5.0 is 32 MB, typically resulting
in higher compression ratio and lower speed than RAR 4.x 4 MB.
c) -md switch syntax is modified to support larger dictionary
sizes. Append 'k', 'm' and 'g' modifiers to specify the size
in kilo-, mega- and gigabytes, like -md64m for 64 MB dictionary.
If modifiers are not present, megabytes are assumed,
so -md64m is equal to -md64;
d) RAR 5.0 format includes Intel IA-32 executable and delta
compression algorithms, but RAR 4.x text, audio, true color
and Itanium algorithms are not supported.
e) RAR 5.0 decompression can utilize several CPU cores.
3. Changes in RAR 5.0 archive format:
a) file times are stored as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)
instead of former local time, making file exchange among
several time zones more straightforward;
b) file names and archive comments use UTF-8 encoding.
4. RAR 5.0 recovery record is based on Reed-Solomon error correction
codes.
5. "Test" command verifies validity of RAR 5.0 recovery record.
Recovery record is tested after processing all archived files.
6. Changes in RAR 5.0 encryption algorithm:
a) encryption algorithm is changed from AES-128 to AES-256 in CBC mode.
Key derivation function is based on PBKDF2 using HMAC-SHA256;
b) special password verification value allows to detect most of
wrong passwords without necessity to unpack the entire file;
7. RAR 5.0 archives allow to utilize 256 bit length BLAKE2sp hash
( https://blake2.net ) instead of 32 bit CRC32 as a file checksum.
8. Features removed:
a) authenticity verification feature did not provide the required
level of reliability and was removed;
b) switch -en (do not add "end of archive" block) is not supported
by RAR 5.0 archives, which always have the end of archive block.
c) old style extension based arcname.rNN volume names are not
supported by RAR 5.0 archives, which use only arcname.partN.rar
volume names;
d) file comments are not supported anymore both in RAR 4.x
and RAR 5.0 archives. Console RAR 'cf' command is removed.
9. "Set password" command and "Dictionary size" option are moved to
"General" page of archiving dialog.
10. You can use "Save symbolic links as links" option on "Advanced" page
of archiving dialog to save and restore NTFS symbolic links
and reparse points as links, so their contents is not archived.
Additional changes available on the developer site.
v4.20.3 [May 3, 2012]
1. Changes in RAR compression:
a) RAR general compression algorithm is optimized for better
utilization of several processor cores. While some speed gain
is possible even in single processor mode, best results
are achieved in multi-core environment.
Speed gain depends on data type and average file size.
Several cores are utilized more efficiently when compressing
large files.
b) we had to increase memory requirements to achieve higher
compression speed. General RAR compression algorithm allocates
about 120 MB comparing to 40 MB in WinRAR 4.11;
c) RAR text compression algorithm cannot utilize several CPU cores
efficiently, so its performance in multiprocessor environment
is much lower than for general algorithm. Also its decompression
speed is much lower than in general algorithm regardless of
CPU number. So we decided to disable the text algorithm by default.
If you need maximum possible compression ratio for plain text data
regardless of speed, you can enable the text compression
in "Advanced compression parameter" dialog. Press "Compression..."
button on "Advanced" page of archiving dialog to access it.
You can also change this option permanently in default compression
profile;
In the command line mode the text compression can be enabled
with -mct switch;
d) "Fastest" (-m1) compression mode also supports several processor
cores now. In 4.11 it could use only a single processor core.
2. RAR general decompression algorithm speed is slightly improved,
though not to same extent as RAR compression. RAR decompression
is not able to use several processor cores, so its performance
does not depend on a number of cores.
3. Changes in ZIP compression:
a) now ZIP compression supports several processor cores resulting
in noticeably higher performance in multi-core environment.
Single CPU ZIP compression is also faster than in 4.11;
b) memory use for ZIP compression is increased to about 15 MB.
4. Recovery volume creating and processing can use several CPU cores
resulting in higher speed. Though, typically hard drive seek speed
is a limiting factor for recovery volumes, so this gain is most
noticeable when working with solid state drive.
5. Now the allowed value for -mt switch is 1 - 32,
not 0 - 16 as before.
6. "Find files" command can search data in 7-Zip archives.
Previously "Find files" did not support .7z archive format.
7. Windows 2000 is not supported by WinRAR and WinRAR self-extracting
modules anymore.
8. "Save current settings" button in "Advanced SFX options" dialog
is now available only when converting an existing archive to SFX.
Options saved with this button are applied only to convert to SFX
operation.
If you create or update SFX archive, only SFX options stored
in default compression profile are used. Options saved
in "Advanced SFX options" dialog are ignored for these operations.
v4.11 [Aug 20, 2011]
1. Improved detection of UTF-8 encoding in file names in ZIP archives.
WinRAR attempts to recognize Unicode names, even when UTF-8 flag is not present in ZIP archive headers.
2. Bugs fixed:
a) If switch -t was set in RAR environment variable, WinRAR "View"command failed to open archived files
b) ""Autodetect" string" option in "Define volume sizes" dialog did not work;
c) If "Split to volumes, size" in default compression profile was set to "Autodetect", "Delete" and "Add comment" commands refused to modify ZIP archives.
v4.01.1 [Dec 8, 2010]
New:
- RARLAB.COM website design.
- WinRAR themes
v3.93 [Aug 21, 2009]
1. This version can decompress 7-Zip archives created with LZMA2 algorithm.
2. Now a password is requested only once when unpacking 7z archives with encrypted file names from context menu. WinRAR 3.90 asked it twice.
3. This version can unpack tar.bz2 archives consisting of several smaller bz2 streams merged together. Previous versions unpacked only the first nested bz2 stream in such composite archive.
4. WinRAR displays CRC32 of files inside of usual .gz (not .tar.gz) archives. Previous versions left this field blank for GZIP files.
5. Bugs fixed:
a) WinRAR 3.90 displayed "Save" button instead of "Open" or "OK" in "Find archive" dialog ("Open archive" command in "File" menu and "Browse..." command in archiving dialog);
b) WinRAR could display incorrect file names when browsing malformed ZIP archives;
c) WinRAR 3.90 failed to decompress LZH archives created with "-lh7-" algorithm;
d) WinRAR 3.90 could fail to delete a part of files after archiving if delete to Recycle Bin was enabled. This bug was present when working in Windows XP, but not in Windows Vista and Windows 7;
e) when unpacking ISO file using WinRAR "Extract files..." command in Explorer context menu, WinRAR could unpack same archived files twice during the same operation. It displayed the overwrite prompt when unpacking files for the second time;
f) hexadecimal search in WinRAR 3.90 "Find" command and console RAR "ih" command failed to find matches if first byte in search string was greater than 127.
v3.93 [Sep 1, 2009]
1. This version can decompress 7-Zip archives created with LZMA2 algorithm.
2. Now a password is requested only once when unpacking 7z archives with encrypted file names from context menu. WinRAR 3.90 asked it twice.
3. This version can unpack tar.bz2 archives consisting of several smaller bz2 streams merged together. Previous versions unpacked only the first nested bz2 stream in such composite archive.
4. WinRAR displays CRC32 of files inside of usual .gz (not .tar.gz) archives. Previous versions left this field blank for GZIP files.
5. Bugs fixed:
a) WinRAR 3.90 displayed "Save" button instead of "Open" or "OK" in "Find archive" dialog ("Open archive" command in "File" menu and "Browse..." command in archiving dialog);
b) WinRAR could display incorrect file names when browsing malformed ZIP archives;
c) WinRAR 3.90 failed to decompress LZH archives created with "-lh7-" algorithm;
d) WinRAR 3.90 could fail to delete a part of files after archiving if delete to Recycle Bin was enabled. This bug was present when working in Windows XP, but not in Windows Vista and Windows 7;
e) when unpacking ISO file using WinRAR "Extract files..." command in Explorer context menu, WinRAR could unpack same archived files twice during the same operation. It displayed the overwrite prompt when unpacking files for the second time;
f) hexadecimal search in WinRAR 3.90 "Find" command and console RAR "ih" command failed to find matches if first byte in search string was greater than 127.
A tool that will help you recover the passwords that you set on your archive.
Extremely simple and free tool to convert RAR and other archive files into ZIP.
