What is WinRAR?
WinRAR is a competing product to WinZip; both products
compress/decompress and archive files. Files compressed with WinRAR
typically have the .rar extension, as opposed to
.zip for WinZip archives. WinRAR can also create and
decompress a WinZip archived file.
Like later versions of WinZip, WinRAR can create archives in multiple
parts; that is, it not only can compress a file but can split it up
into smaller parts. In WinZip, this is called a split Zip file; in
WinRAR, it's called a multipart or multivolume archive. When this is
done, the smaller RAR files are given the following extensions, in
this order: .rar, .r00, .r01,
and so forth. To decompress a multipart archive, make sure all the
component files are in the same directory and double-click the
.rar file. WinRAR will automatically find all the other files
without you having to select them, and assemble the final decompressed
file from them.
Last modified on May 13, 2009.
