He's got to get value of money out of it, after all registering WinRAR it isn't cheap.

There were a lot of programs distributed as rar archives.

I've been using WinRAR for multiple decades and it works well. I'm not about to rearchive all my stuff with a new format so of course I still use it regularly. If I were a new computer user I might choose something else as I certainly experimented with various tools back in 2000. WinAce comes to mind as a decent competitor of the time.

I believe 7-Zip can open RAR archives.

7-Zip's GUI is very lacking, at least on Windows it doesn't have the basic feature of opening the folder where you extracted the files automatically

Use Peazip then.

... Or just stick with WinRAR, which works better than both of those, and is still supported?

And is closed source with an annoying pop up.

Was just going to mention 7-Zip after reading GP post, then read yours.

Yes. I've used 7-Zip some, earlier, and found it to be quite good. IIRC, from both command-line and GUI.

And IIRC the command-line options were like tar; they could be typed without a leading hyphen.

I still have a valid WinRAR licence, I think.

7-zip's GUI is basically an incomplete WinRar clone, and WinRar has a couple more features. Most notably recovery records to be able to recover from mild bit rot, but it can also preserve more NTFS attributes of your files (saving alternate streams, security records, turning hard links into links) and can optionally respect the Archive attribute of files (archiving only files with the attribute set, clearing the attribute after, optionally deleting them).

It's a very solid archival program. I wouldn't recommend that everyone runs out and buys it, and I use 7zip more than Winrar, but it does have some advantages, especially on Windows.

Not only that, WinRAR is also well optimized and polished. 7-zip development has basically stopped because no one pays for it.

They just released a new beta last month. Doesn't seem very "stopped" to me.

After almost a year since last stable.

Then call it slow development, not stopped. A stable a year ago and a beta a month ago is more active than most software out there, for which development literally stopped.

Or do you have any affiliation with WinRAR?

No affiliation, I just use both and compare.

"...and WinRar has a couple more features"

Like the one that 7zip has AES256 encryption and WinRar can't open it, that one?

Oddly enough, I ran into an odd case a few months ago with a zip file which required me to use winrar.

In windows, when you extract a zip file that contains japanese characters, they get 'garbled', which can cause problems if you need to maintain the directory and file names. I tried with 7-Zip as well with the same outcome.

I found a fix on stackoverflow [1] which mentioned using winrar, as it had an option to change the name encoding for archived file names. Using that I was able to extract the zip and the files and directories maintained their original japanese names.

[1] - https://superuser.com/questions/554108/extracting-a-zip-file...

infozip also has problems with japanese characters. I ended up solving the problem with the python zip module. considerably more awkward to use but it offers a lot of control over the extraction process.

I did not look it very closely so I don't know what exactly infozip was getting incorrect in my case. but I did find this interesting bug report from 2012. Apparently a lot of encoders are sloppy about the spec and will leave header fields zeroed rather than set them. and if infozip reads a header that says the zipfile was created by dos(a zero) it believes it and extracts it using a dos compatible encoding.

https://sourceforge.net/p/infozip/support-requests/10/