How can I extract .rar files on the Mac?

Question

Is there anything built-in that does this? (E.g. command line tools.) Or are there any third-party apps?

Update: I like The Unarchiver, but vote up your favourite, or add it as an answer if it isn’t there.

Solution 1

The Unarchiver really does it's job well (and it's also completely free). From the site:

Supported file formats include Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, RAR, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt and many other more and less obscure formats. The goal is to make The Unarchiver able to extract anything you give it. The Unarchiver uses the libxad unarchiving library to support many older, obscure formats.

Solution 2

Using Homebrew, in a terminal type:

brew install rar

to use it just navigate to your file and type

unrar x <filename>

Or list files via unrar l archive.rar and extract single file: unrar e archive.rar folder/file.exe desired_location/

Solution 3

Just for completeness: Fink, MacPorts, Rudix and Homebrew provide versions of the command-line unrar.

The Rudix version is a binary, which means that you don't even need XCode or GCC to install it.

Solution 4

Nothing built-in if I'm not mistaken (no access to a Mac now).

RAR has a command line version for Mac OS X. UnRarX is a GUI program to extract RAR files.

UPDATE: UnRarX is now deprecated and it's site is down.

Solution 5

I found The Unarchiver as mentioned to be great for about 80% of the RAR files I run into. The other almost "perfect" RAR extractor would be RAR Expander My only complaint is it doesn't automatically quit after extraction.

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Comments

[mendota]

seems weird that this was closed? this is a common superuser problem on mac

[CNJ]

Aha: what sort of issues does it have with the other 20%? I did notice some recent release notes said “RAR bug fixes”, so that’s pretty good evidence that there are (or at least were) RAR issues.

[Josh K]

Pathfinder is overkill if you are just extracting RAR files. Booting it up takes a while too. It's great for integration at the expense of Finder.

[quack quixote]

they're probably using their own code (or basing off the open-source). so there may be format incompatibilities with the latest RAR format.

[alex]

It really is incredibly easy to use. That's why I always recommend it :)

[Dan Rosenstark]

@Josh K, this was true in 2009, but now SSDs and bootup are much faster, at least.

[Josh K]

Not everyone (and by that I mean a majority of Mac users) don't have SSD's. Pathfinder is still–in my opinion–overkill on a system.

[tgdavies]

And you can use it from the command line -- just say 'open foo.rar' or download the command line tools: superuser.com/questions/190053/…

[cubuspl42]

Note, that the Mac App Store version is much more annoying that the one from the website. It asks you for your permission every time when you extract an archive! Use the one from the official website.

[rocketspacer]

How do I unrar to a specific directory

[IMJS]

Great suggestion! Thanks! The Unarchiver is good.

[g10guang]

CLI is good for programmer.

[Tom]

@rocketspacer: you can optionally specify a path to extract to; run unrar without any arguments to see more details.

[Linus]

Sadly "unrar was deleted from homebrew/core in commit 3f8c7632a6: unrar: remove (incompatible license) See fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Unrar"

[buncis]

any alternatives? unrar is no more in brew

[user128048]

Due to unrar was removed from homebrew, I use 7z instead: brew install p7zip and then 7z x <filename.rar>

[sligocki]

unrar doesn't exist any more in homebrew. But brew install rar provides an unrar tool.