Unpack rar archive on mac. RAR on Mac (macOS) - how to open: free archiver. What does the word archivist mean?

Below you will find free programs distributed under licenses

7-Zip is one of the best free archivers. The program has a high speed of compression and extraction, supports setting a password for the archive and works with the following formats: 7z, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, TAR, ZIP, WIM, can decompress ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO , LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z.

B1 Free Archiver

B1 Free Archiver is a free multi-platform file archiver. In addition, the program can act as a file manager. The archiver has been translated into more than 30 languages ​​and works under such operating systems as Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Android. B1 Free Archiver supports features such as compression, decompression and encryption (password setting) for ZIP and native B1 format.

Such a program as an archiver is a working tool for the user of any operating system, be it windows, linux or Mac OS. Often the data that needs to be sent over the Internet to a colleague or interlocutor has an unacceptable size, probably most often it concerns mail, then a file archiver comes to the rescue, which, using different compression algorithms, reduces the file size to an acceptable one. The degree of file compression by the archiver depends largely on the contents of the file, namely on its extension, txt or jpeg, for example.

And if it’s even simpler, then the archiver is such a container-press where your files are placed (archiving process), and they are compressed and stored in it, until you unzip them (unzip process), while all files will remain in that the way you put them there.

In other cases, the archiver simply adds convenience when you need to send several files of different formats. And in this case, the user can archive several files (put them in a container), get one archive, and send only one archived file, and not a whole bunch of files that will have to be uploaded one by one, which takes time and causes inconvenience. Similarly, the side that receives your file will download one archive instead of many different files, convenient isn't it?!

You also need to highlight one feature of archiving - the ability to set a password for the archive (container with your files), which means nothing more than the fact that only by knowing the password you can access the archived data, isn't it safe ?!

The most popular archiving formats today are: Zip, RAR, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, 7-zip.

How to use The Unarchiver

1. After installation, run The Unarchiver:

2. Check the boxes for at least Zip, RAR and 7-zip formats.

3. The minimum configuration of the archiver is over. Now, to unzip files, you just need to double-click on the archive and it will be unzipped to the same folder on the computer where the archive itself is located.

The archiver is one of the most important programs installed in the first place on any computer, since most programs and any other information are most conveniently transferred in an archive. And the point here is not even that the total file size in the archive becomes smaller due to compression, but just in the convenience of sharing one file. It is understandable - it is easier to upload and download one file than, for example, 1283 photos.

In Mac OS, as in Windows, by default there is a built-in utility for opening zip archives, which somehow simplifies the initial work, but you will not be able to create an archive or open an archive of the more popular .rar format until you download something more powerful like WinRar or 7zip. But they, unfortunately, only work on Windows.

If you have a Mac OS operating system, then you will most likely be surprised that open .rar archive on Mac impossible by standard means. To do this, you need a special software - archiver. Fortunately, there are plenty of them for Mac, and most of them are free. We have selected the most popular free archivers for Mac OS and compared their convenience. We will talk about the faster and more convenient way to open any archive on Mac in this article.

The best program in terms of price / quality ratio (because it is free and high-quality) turned out to be The Unarchiver (or rather unarchiver). This is a great example of free software that quickly and easily solves the problem - allows unpack archives of many different formats on Mac OS, including open.pap.

Since in this article we are only considering the issue of opening archives, we will not talk about programs that can be used to create them. Read our article about them. Unfortunately, on Apple computers it is more convenient to do this with different programs, but so far there is no universal and free one.

So, The Unarchiver is a free program, which is also available for download in the official Apple AppStore, which is a guarantee of security for your operating system.

The program can open (unzip) a huge number of different formats, including the most popular ones: rar, zip, 7zip and others.

The program is absolutely free and easy to use. Just install it from the standard way. After that, in the settings, you can select a list of formats that the program will automatically open. The main archive formats are highlighted by default, so you don't have to change anything if you don't know why.

Now, to open any archive, you just need to double-click on it, and its contents will be automatically unpacked into the same folder next to it. That's all, now it's not a problem for you to open any archive on Mac.

It’s also worth adding that if for some reason you don’t want to install the program on your computer, and you need to open the archive urgently and right now, you can use the unzip site, most recently we talked about a service that knows.

Daily articles and news from the world of Apple.

Write about archiving files and archivers for Mac OS prompted one of the readers who asked me a question: are there archivers and unzippers for poppies? I will try to describe what Mac OS has out of the box and what else can be delivered in order to work comfortably with archives.

Archive Utility - zip archives

One of the conveniences that I discovered in my time after switching from Win to Mac was the built-in support for zip archives in Mac OS X - one of the most common formats that is supported by many operating systems. To create a zip archive, just select the file(s) in the Finder, right-click (or ctrl+click) and choose "Compress" from the context menu. After that, a zip file is created with a copy of the files and with the name “Archive.zip”, if there are more than one archived files, or if there is one file, then the name of the archive will match the name of the original file.

Unpacking zip files is just as easy as archiving. By default, the "Archiving Utility" is launched automatically by double-clicking on a zip archive, which leads to unpacking the contents of the archive into a folder of the same name if there are more than one file. In addition, the original zip file remains untouched, that is, when unpacking, a copy of the contents of the archive is created.

Built-in zip support also comes into play when downloading files from the web in Safari. After the zip is downloaded, it will automatically be unpacked by the same "Archiving Utility". In most cases, this default behavior is "what you need", but sometimes it's annoying.

Working with archives from Mac OS X Terminal

More advanced users can create archives from the Terminal. To do this, Mac OS X has several utilities, for example, gzip, bzip2, tar. Moreover, if the first two are archivers, then tar is a “packer” of files - it archives a group of files into one without compression. tar is used just in conjunction with gzip and bzip2, which, according to the “Unix tradition”, can only clamp one file: they perform one function, but well. Therefore, usually, files or folders with files are first packed into a tar archive, and then the already received file is compressed with gzip or bzip2.

You can read more about these archivers on Wikipedia:,. Many, of course, will not want to bother with the Terminal for archiving files. But it is worth noting that bzip2, for example, clamps better than standard zip or gzip, although it is slower. In addition, gzip is used by Mac OS itself to archive logs, for example.

I often make manual backups of files using the tar utility, which correctly saves information about files and folders (permissions, creation time, etc.). In addition, tar can be "ask" to compress a tar archive into bzip2. As a result, with one command, with the appropriate switches, we get the .tbz file, in which the files are correctly packed (tar) and well clamped (bz2).

Custom way - .dmg

Among the standard set of Mac OS programs is Disk Utility, which is not designed to archive files, but in principle it can be achieved from it. The idea is simple - creating compressed dmg images. To do this, in the Disk Utility, “go” to the address “File-> New-> Disk Image from Folder ...” (shortcut Command + Shift + N) and select a folder with files in the dialog that appears. Further, in the next dialog for saving the dmg-image, select the name and format of the image - “compressed”. If I understand everything correctly, then the content will be clamped by the same zip.

I even once tested the compression ratio in dmg and zip. It turns out about the same - compressed dmg images are a little (10%–15%) more than a zip archive.

I took different types of files with a total size of 100 MB:

Third Party Archivers

The main reason why hands reach out to put some kind of program for working with archives is the need to unpack rar files. It so happened historically that rar was at one time widely used on “one sixth of the land”. This is connected, in my opinion, with the ability to split a rar-archive into volumes (parts), a higher compression ratio than zip, and a set of all sorts of gadgets like setting passwords for an archive and the like. The level of compression was important even 5 years ago, when the price per gigabyte of hard disk space was high, burning to DVD is also expensive, and you can’t invest much in email.

As a result, many under Windows continue to use rar as the main archiver, and there are still a bunch of files packed in rar on the Web.

Stuffit Expander

The program is called "must have". The main advantages are free and the ability to unpack a bunch of formats, including rar. Stuffit Expander does not know how to archive at all, for this there is its older (and paid) brother Stuffit Deluxe.

I will not be mistaken if I say that in 99.9% of cases, for a happy mac-life, the Archiving Utility + Stuffit Expander is enough.

Stuffit Deluxe

This archiver costs $79, but it can already do much more than Stuffit Expander. Firstly, it can compress into more than 20 archive formats, including rar, sitx, cab and all the formats mentioned above. To be honest, I don’t use it, but if you often need to clip into something exotic for Mac, or you need to split archives into volumes for uploading to file storages (hello warez :), then Stuffit Deluxe will come in handy of course.

A good alternative to Stuffit Expander, and the built-in archiver in Mac OS, can be The Unarchiver. From the name it is already clear that the software is designed for unpacking files. The Unarchiver supports many archiving formats (including sitx from the developers of Stuffit), integrates with Finder, doesn't get confused with non-English filenames, etc. The Unarchiver is free and open-source.

There is no such thing as WinRAR for Mac yet. From the developers of the rar-format, we have waited until the command-line utilities. It is distributed for free as a 40-day version (then you have to pay, although I don’t know how they control it), and if sometimes you need to download it in rar and be friends with the Terminal, then nothing else is needed for normal work and a carefree life.

BetterZip

Not very expensive ($19.95) and fairly popular archiver (thanks for the tip in the comments). Supports tons of formats: IP, SIT, TAR, GZip, BZip2, RAR, 7-Zip, CPIO, ARJ, LZH/LHA, JAR, WAR, CAB, ISO, CHM, RPM, DEB, NSIS, BIN, HQX, DD. In addition, there is support for a quick preview of the archive through Quick Look. To do this, you need to download a special plugin.

It is worth paying attention also to this archiver ($26). Like BetterZip, iArchiver is written in the best Mac-Usability tradition. Supports not so many formats: clamps - Zip, DMG, 7-zip, Tar, Gzip, Bzip2, Z and CPIO; unpacks: Zip, RAR, 7-zip, StuffIt, Gzip, Bzip2, ARJ, Z, LhA, DMG, hqx, rpm and so on. In addition, it can convert rar archives to zip. In general, it is simple and understandable.