RAR has some unique built-in characteristics like recovery record (useful when archiving on optical discs, or any other media which can degrade in time) and recovery volumes (which was a life-saver feature in the age of floppy disks).

Another major contributor is likely that with rar you can make a multi-file self-extractor. Seem to recall that before broadband and torrents, many a pirated game was released as a split rar .exe that could fit on floppies and was spread across numerous upload sites.

Dump them all in a dir, run the exe, and game on...

7z can't do the exe bit I don't think, but it can make split archives of arbitrary size (in bytes).

Providing executable packages is a terrible practice anyway and should be discouraged. It reinforces the view that it's OK to execute random untrusted programs just to get a document, the most popular assumption abused by malware developers.

I can't deny that that's true.

It's inconvenient too, as nothing in this house runs Windows right now, and extracting custom fancy EXEs* can get annoying.

(*: Most archivers can reopen the EXEs they create as par the course, and there are lots of extractors and unpackers out there, but I vaguely remember a few incidents where I wanted to extract an executable archive/installer of some kind and couldn't. In some cases pushing the EXE through Wine worked.)

I believe winzip had the same feature of creating a exe zip spanning over multiple files, for using on floppies.

I only remember using that feature when zipping something up myself and it would have you keep inserting floppies as needed. I'm sure you could then post images of the floppies for distribution but I never really saw that done. It was always .r00, .r01, etc on usenet.

True, though i think the making scheme of rar was more helpful. Also, rar compressed various file formats (video and audio specifically) better.

Just what I was going to ask about. I thought WinRAR had the option to include parity checks / redundancy within the data.

BTW, is there a current... "turnkey" (simple, "clicky"), I guess, *NIX solution for doing that within an archive?

There is this par2cmdline[1] tool which is (as the name suggests) a console program "for creating and using PAR2[2] files to detect damage in data files and repair them if necessary". GPar2[3] (alpha) is a simple GTK+ GUI for it.

[1] - https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive

[3] - https://github.com/Parchive/gpar2

If you want to build something like that, http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/utils/file/ras-1.03.tar.gz can provide the redundancy support.

Well, on my planet it has.

The 7zip program is much less nice-looking. And rar works.

This is because, on Windows, you can't double click a 7z file and have it open 7zip. If they fixed that, they'd have a winner.

If you have .7z files associated with 7z File Manager, it will open on double click. Is that not the default on installation?

You double click on the file and Windows shows two 7zip programs as an option.

If you choose the wrong one it will not work later.

And it will not repeat the dialog box with the options.

On HN you're probably expected to be able to change file associations when you don't like them.

It is the default. It's always worked for me just fine.

You are so lucky. I've installed on every Windows machine I've had for years and have never had it work out of the box. I've got to right-click a .7z and choose open with -> 7zip.

I'll take a look at my setup when I get home tonight.

You can change the associations in the program settings but you have to be in administrator mode, otherwise they don't stick. http://www.7-zip.org/faq.html

It doesn't associate on setup. You have to open 7zip, go to options and you see this http://i.imgur.com/12dpE7G.png

I usually click "Select all" then unselect ISO. Done.

Edit: other person replied it must be opened in Administrator mode. That explains why I didn't have it associated.

I haven't seen a RAR in ages.

You know people who use WinRAR?

I and everyone I know locally uses WinRAR, nobody uses 7zip.

Seems to be mostly Russians and warez scene kids still using winrar

What about Ukrainians?

In Russia RAR is still the default format :(

Have you ever downloaded a scene release?

You do realise you can decompress .rar using 7zip right?

But the scene releases are not using 7zip to create the rars, are they?

Among the movers and shakers in the scene, isn't there generally a predilection to use free software over non-free software? E.g. the only time I run across matroska contained movies is when it's released from the scene.

Not really. There's a general predilection for the best software available, especially since they're unconstrained by purchase costs. Often the free program is the best, but not always.

"Best software" - Are you joking? Scene releases use winrar mostly for packing and splitting. Usually null-compression is used.

Yeah it's usually an ISO within multiple RARs within multiple ZIPs. And this is when they don't act playful and use an obscure archive format that can only be extracted with a (paid or free but infected) closed source app.

Depending on the platform I'm using I have some code in bash, Powershell and C# to deal with this. Non coders must have a hard time !

Jdownloader automatically extracts archives, no fancy scripts needed.

From my observation, most downloads are rar format (95% at a guess), but it doesn't really matter if it's rar or 7z as the differences in resource usage are negligible.

The good news is that most archives support free extraction of both formats.

What formats are you referring to? o.o

It's bin a while since I encountered it, but I remember having to hunt for MagicISO or PowerISO to open several archives that I couldn't find anywhere else.

You don't!?

I don't. Feel free to read my reasoning here: http://www.7-zip.org/license.txt

They could try to replace the nonfree unrar code with the one from libarchive.