WinRAR

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WinRAR
WinRAR 3.70 running on Windows Vista
Maintainer:	Eugene Roshal / Alexander Roshal
Stable release:	3.62 (2006-12-04) _[+/-]
Preview release:	3.70 beta 5 (2007-03-19) _[+/-]
OS:	Windows 95, 98, Me, 2000, XP Mac OS X GNU/Linux FreeBSD
Use:	File archiver
License:	Proprietary
Website:	www.rarlab.com

WinRAR is a shareware file archiver and data compression utility by Eugene Roshal. It is arguably one of the two main file archive programs for Windows, along with WinZip. It is one of the few applications that is able to create RAR archives natively, as the encoding method is held to be proprietary.

The current developer is Eugene Roshal, while his brother Alexander Roshal is engaged in business of the software. Eugene Roshal was born in Russia on March 10, 1972 and graduated from Chelyabinsk Technical University.

1 Features
2 Versions and ports
3 Easter Eggs
4 Trivia
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Features

WinRAR supports the following features:

Complete support for RAR and ZIP archives, and unpacking of CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, ACE, UUE, BZ2, JAR, ISO, 7z and Z archives.
The ability to create self-extracting and multi-volume (split) archives.
Data redundancy is provided via recovery records and recovery volumes, allowing to reconstruct even damaged archives.
Support for advanced NTFS file system options and Unicode in file names.
Optional archive encryption using AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with a 128-bit key.

[edit] Versions and ports

There are several ports of WinRAR to other platforms. Only the Windows version is called WinRAR. The versions for other platforms are named RAR for Linux, RAR for Mac OS X, RAR for FreeBSD, etc. A Pocket PC version is also available.

Notable version changes include:

From version 3.50 beta 1, WinRAR adds support for interface skins and themes.
From version 3.50, WinRAR supports Windows XP x64.
From version 3.51, a few security vulnerabilities and bugs are addressed.
From version 3.60 beta 1, WinRAR includes a multithreaded version of the compression algorithm, which improves compression speed on systems with dual-core or hyperthreading-enabled CPUs.

[edit] Easter Eggs

When using version 3.30+, select the "About WinRAR..." option from the help menu. Click on the archive 'book' on the left of the pop up to watch it fall and bounce with sound effects.
Clicking the WinRAR logo in the "About WinRAR..." box will cause the ocean to start moving and a small sail-boat to appear.

[edit] Trivia

WinRAR is used as a joking replacement for "winner" by some members of the online community. It has been popularized by forums such as 4chan, probably due to the immense use of WinRAR to share files by pasting a URL to a site where a ".rar" file can be downloaded.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

RARlab WinRAR website (win-rar.com)
RARlab main website (rarlab.com)
WinRAR Polish website (winrar.pl)
Maximum Compression, a site providing test results for various file types using different compression tools (including WinRAR)
WinRAR older versions - All of the old versions from version 1.54 to the latest one
A WinRAR Review
WINRAR as WINNAR citation