RAR (file format)
| Filename extension | .rar, .rev, .r00, .r01 |
|---|---|
| Internet media type | application/vnd.rar |
| Uniform Type Identifier (UTI) | com.rarlab.rar-archive |
| Magic number |
52 61 72 21 1A 07 00(RAR 1.5 to 4.0) 52 61 72 21 1A 07 01 00(RAR 5+) |
| Developed by | Eugene Roshal |
| Initial release | March 1993 |
| Type of format | archive format |
| Open format? | No (decompression source code is available, but it's not free software due to the restriction that it must not be used to reverse engineer the RAR compression algorithm) |
| Website | rarlab |
RAR is a proprietaryarchive file format that supports data compression, error recovery and file spanning. It was developed by a Russian software engineer, Eugene Roshal (the name RAR stands for Roshal Archive) and the RAR software is licensed by win.rar GmbH.
The filename extensions used by RAR are .rar for the data volume set and .rev for the recovery volume set. Previous versions of RAR split large archives into several smaller files, creating a "multi-volume archive". Numbers were used in the file extensions of the smaller files to keep them in the proper sequence. The first file used the extension .rar, then .r00 for the second, and then .r01, .r02, etc.
RAR compression applications and libraries (including GUI based WinRAR application for Windows, console rar utility for different OSes and others) are proprietary software, to which Alexander L. Roshal, the elder brother of Eugene Roshal, owns the copyright. Version 3 of RAR is based on Lempel-Ziv (LZSS) and prediction by partial matching (PPM) compression, specifically the PPMd implementation of PPMII by Dmitry Shkarin.
The minimum size of a RAR file is 20 bytes. The maximum size of a RAR file is 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (263-1) bytes, which is 8 exbibytes minus 1 byte.
The RAR file format revision history:
Software is available for Microsoft Windows (named WinRAR), Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Android; archive extraction is supported natively in Chrome OS. WinRAR supports the Windows Graphical User Interface (GUI); other versions named RAR run as console commands. Later versions are not compatible with some older operating systems previously supported:
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