RAR Expander is an open source program for MAC OSx that allows you to open/extract files from RAR archives (again, only on MAC not on Windows).
RAR Expander offers support for both single and multipart RAR archives, being able to open password-protected RAR files too. It is based on the unRAR library, thus it is fully compatible with the RAR archives produced by the official creator of RAR, WinRAR. RAR Expander cannot create RAR archives, it only reads and extracts them. AppleScript is supported too, thus you'll find several useful examples for expanding multiple archives at once using RAR Expander.
So if you're having questions such as "How to Open .Rar Files on a Mac" and "Is there any free RAR expander for Mac", RAR expander is the solution. Of course the official program for RAR archives is WinRAR, but to my knowledge, it only comes with a command line utility on MAC OS X, so it's not really compatible with the beautiful graphics MACs usually have.
The RAR archive format is best file compression format not only because of its compression ratio, but also because it supports multi-part archives and RAR archives are more reliable. When it comes to opening/reading RAR files on MAC, why pay for WinRAR when you can get RAR Expander for free?
Mac OS X 10.3.9 or above is required in order to run RAR Expander 0.84. However if you have an older version of Mac OS X, you can download RAR Expander 0.7 which works with OS X 10.2 too. Below you can find the links for the latest versions of RAR Expander (the last update was in 2006, but the program still works fine):
First of all you'll need to download and install RAR expander on your MAC (use one of the links above). Once it's installed on your computer, expanding RAR files on MAC is very easy:
- Open RAR Expander
- Go to File and then select Expand
- Select the RAR archive and choose where to save the extracted files
- Optionally you have settings that let you set by default the destination folder, as well as if to create or not surrounding directories and if to check or not for updates
RAR Expander works only on MAC, so there isn't a version for Windows. However, there are many RAR utilities on Windows that let you open rar archives, such as: WinRAR, WinZIP, Bitzipper and the popular open source 7-zip (that does open RAR archvies too).
Rar Expander was started by its author because at the time there wasn't a RAR utility that could expand RAR archives on MAC OS X (except WinRAR but it didn't have a GUI) with support for multi-part archives. However in the meantime other RAR extractors were developed for MAC, so here are the other utilities if you're interested in trying something else:
WinRAR is the "father" of RAR
Stuffit Expander, supports RAR archives and works on Mac OS X
unRARx is practically a GUI for the unRAR command utility
MacPAR deLuxe supports RAR archives too
