Opening .rar files

[alan]

On Thu, 1 Nov 2007, Bruno Wolff III wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 13:19:40 -0600,
>  Robin Laing <Robin.Laing at drdc-rddc.gc.ca> wrote:
>> True but rar will also create parity blocks to check and repair the
>> split files.
>
> I find it difficult to believe that this is the right place to introduce
> redundancy. Including a hash with each part so that you can detect broken
> ones is useful. Sending out multiple copies seems like a waste of bandwidth.
> And if you really want to do this, wouldn't it be easier to just post them
> multiple times?

His description is not correct.

Rar is a compression scheme.  The parity blocks are created by a different 
tool.  The advantage to rar is that it will split into multiple files, as 
well as handle long file names and all the other features that modern 
compression users want.  It has checksums to determine damage, but not 
recovery information.  For that you use par2.

I use unrar and par2cmdline and they work fine.  (With the exception of 
the rare damaged par file.  Moving to a different par recovery tool 
usually solves that problem.)

-- 
Q: Why do programmers confuse Halloween and Christmas?
A: Because OCT 31 == DEC 25.