Failing to unrar files

Question

I'm sorry to ask this, but all of the questions along similar lines I could find have been answered by installing unrar/7zip.

So, I received a book in the form of a .rar archive of jpegs. Initially, I tried to uncompress with 7zip from terminal. It goes through each file in the archive and for each file in the archive, says,

Extracting   cover.jpg     Unsupported Method

After doing some quick googling, I thought it was due to lack of .rar codecs, as it's not technically freeware or somesuch. After installing unrar, from the terminal I run

unrar -x Books.rar

And it goes through and just says "Failed" in the place of 7zip's "Unsupported Method."

I thought it could be a corrupt file or something, so I had a friend compress a random jpg as .rar and send it to me, and I encountered the same program. Double clicking it opens unroller, which then promptly closes.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Solution 1

Execute following command in terminal :

sudo apt-get install unace unrar zip unzip p7zip-full p7zip-rar sharutils rar uudeview mpack arj cabextract file-roller

Then extract any rar file.

Edit : rar is provided in the multiverse component, so you must enable that repository.

Solution 2

Complement your installation of 7zip with p7zip-rar, the non-free rar module for p7zip:

sudo apt-get install p7zip-rar

Solution 3

You can download the latest version off winrar for linux on their website.

Then extract it with the following command (this is not a rar archive fortunately)

tar xvf rarlinux-x64-6.0.2.tar.gz

It creates a folder named rarin which there is an executable of the same name. You can use it to decompress your archive.

For example if your archive is in the same folder as the rar folder.

./rar/rar x Books.rar

Remark: you may need to allow execution on the rar executable with chmod a+x rar/rar.

Comments

[user300458]

Hmm, very strange. I've never encountered any problems using unrar.

[user1114]

I have the same problem. Archive Manager is openning just for a second, and terminal output says failed.

[jcollum]

many of those are reporting "no installation candidate" -- did you forget to add a PPA?

[Faizan Akram Dar]

rar is provided in the multiverse component, so you must enable that repository.

[jcollum]

Then you should update your answer to include that

[Amichai Schreiber]

worked! how annoying that there's one 'unrar' that works and another that doesn't.

[That Brazilian Guy]

+1. That did it for me. Thanks!

[amzon-ex]

why does this work? Please explain.

[toliveira]

@amzon-ex, please see unix.stackexchange.com/questions/522958/…