Wetlook World Forum

I just notice that people are asking over and over what RAR files are. You're not the only person lately to want to use RAR, but RAR files are typically used by software pirates, and not by anyone else. I used them way back in my DOS days as they were marginally more efficient than Zip files, but not a whole lot. For best compression, use BZip, but that's another relatively obscure format. GZip is less obscure and still superior to zip, but zip is still the universal format. Mac OS X natively supports UNIX compression like GZip and BZip, but I don't know about Mac OS 9's free versions of StuffIt. Windows folk, can uncompress whatever the most popular archiver will handle. What this is, I have no idea ... WinZip maybe? Win XP does zip natively now, but many people still have 2000, Me, 98 or even 95! I use StuffIt Expander for Windows, and that does in fact do RAR. I have a feeling 7-Zip for Windows, a free compression tool, also decompresses RAR. Neither will compress RAR, as you will have to pay for that, but free RAR decompression in other apps is permitted by RARLabs.

But of course, for grouping files together, use zip. Try to use zip with no compression, to save on time at both ends. (I prefer tar for that task, but I can't assume that most Windows folk have the means to untar, whereas Mac OS X and *NIX folk all can and OS X will probably give you a nice zip icon to show you what the file is. OK, tar is not compressed -- and that's the whole point! -- but Mac OS likes to keep things simple ;)