RAR

RAR (Roshal Archive) is a compressed archive format used by the compression software RAR and WinRAR. It was originally for DOS, but has been widely used on Windows (as WinRAR) and other platforms.

The developers make the decompression code available for use in other programs and allow its distribution, but with a license provision that "You cannot use the unrar source to re-create the RAR compression algorithm, which is proprietary."

File identification

Current versions start their files with (hex) 52 61 72 21 1A 07, followed by 00 or 01. Early versions start with 52 45 7E 5E.

Specifications

Before v1.50:

• RAR140DC.EXE (self-extracting RAR archive) → technote.doc

v1.50-4.20:

• wrar420.exe (self-extracting RAR archive) → TechNote.txt

5.0 format:

• RAR 5.0 archive format

Various:

• Forensics Wiki article

Software

• WinRAR website
  • Free UnRAR.dll
  • UnRAR source
• Konvertor
• 7-Zip
• The Unarchiver

Sample files

• http://cd.textfiles.com/ataricompendium/FILES/MISC/PRTFOLIO/
• http://cd.textfiles.com/thebbsorg/max_files/
• https://telparia.com/fileFormatSamples/archive/rar/ → *.rar

Links

• Wikipedia article
• Mini RAR poster
• ReScene's list of RAR versions