Over the past series of posts, we have been looking at how to create and extract files of various archive types - Zip, Gzip, and 7z, as well as a general method of creating archives of various types in the post “Creating Other Archive Types Using 7-Zip Command Line In C# & .NET”.

You may have noticed there haven’t been any posts about creating RAR files, a format that was fairly popular for some time, succeeding the Zip format.

The reason for this is as follows:

  1. RAR is a proprietary format, fully developed, owned, and controlled by Eugene Roshal and RAR Labs.
  2. There are no free tools for creating RAR files (except for the Android version). All the tools available are trial versions by RAR Labs

Thus, it does not seem like a good investment to produce RAR files (unless you have purchased the software).

You can still extract RAR files, however, as outlined in this post.

Happy hacking!