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: Mon, 30 Jun 2025 13:30:03 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: the-candyden-of-code
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Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote at 16:37 this Friday (GMT):
> candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Yes it does (I forgot about its ability to do so) and was very 
> necessary when using it for its designed purpose (streaming the archive 
> to tape) given that each tape is of finite length.
>
> And it is also another example of a tool that those who know only 
> winblows would not know existed and so they would be inclined to 
> "recreate something similar, and poorly".

Oh right, the classic trick of splitting stuff up between multiple tapes
:D

>> Not sure if that trick works if you add compression, but it's there.
>
> Since compression is added after the "tar" processing, it has no 
> bearing on the splitting.


Good to know!
-- 
user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom