Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Why Is Anybody Using WinRAR?
Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2025 05:50:04 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: the-candyden-of-code
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Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote at 17:18 this Thursday (GMT):
> candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:
>> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote at 00:56 this Thursday (GMT):
>>> A few times, I have downloaded .rar archives and tried re-encoding
>>> them as .7z. In every case, the 7-Zip version was smaller.
>>>
>>> Why would anybody bother with .rar any more?
>>>
>>><https://www.tomshardware.com/software/winrar-exploit-enables-attackers-to-run-malicious-code-on-your-pc-critical-vulnerability-patched-in-latest-beta-update>
>> 
>> 
>> Compatibility?
>
> The more common reason is that rar is used in "the scene" for video 
> files (I believe because it was first, way back, with the ability to 
> split a larger than X size file into X sized chunks as part of creating 
> the archive).  And then taking the resulting "rars" and upon 
> extraction, recreating that "larger than X" file.
>
> Infozip has 'zipsplit', but it splits a zip up file by file, and if one 
> file is 4G, one of the output zips is also 4G.
>
> 7-zip may provide this "slice/reassemble" ability now (I don't know, I 
> don't make much of any use of it) but "legacy compatibility with the 
> way it has always been done" in "the scene" keeps 'rar' as the thing.
>
> When one then obtains one of those files via other mechanisms 
> (bittorrent, alt.binaries.*, etc.) sometimes whomever posted the files 
> there simply leaves them as the original 'rar'.
>
>
> Of course, for those of us with Linux/Unix backgrounds, we simply saw 
> windoze users recreating, badly, that which we already had available in 
> our toolset (split --bytes=1000000 big_file big_file_, followed later 
> by cat big_file_* > big_file to reasemble).


I'll also point out that tar supports splitting up files between
archives (i believe), and you can even extract files out of a single
archive as long as the whole file is stored there. Not sure if that
trick works if you add compression, but it's there.
-- 
user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom