WinRAR is a powerful archive manager (Win32, Linux, Mac). RAR files can usually compress content by 8 percent to 15 percent more than ZIP files can. WinRAR is a powerful compression tool with many integrated additional functions to help you organize your compressed archives. It can backup your data and reduce size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format.

WinRAR puts you ahead of the crowd when it comes to compression. By consistently creating smaller archives, WinRAR is often faster than the competition. This will save you disc space, transmission costs AND valuable working time as well. WinRAR is ideal for multimedia files. WinRAR automatically recognizes and selects the best compression method. The special compression algorithm compresses multimedia files, executables and object libraries particularly well.

Features of WinRAR:
  • Using WinRAR puts you ahead of the crowd when it comes to compression by consistently making smaller archives than the competition, saving disk space and transmission costs.
  • WinRAR provides complete support for RAR and ZIP archives and is able to unpack CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, ACE, UUE, BZ2, JAR, ISO, 7Z, Z archives.
  • WinRAR offers a graphic interactive interface utilizing mouse and menus as well as the command line interface.
  • WinRAR is easier to use than many other archivers with the inclusion of a special "Wizard" mode which allows instant access to the basic archiving functions through a simple question and answer procedure. This avoids confusion in the early stages of use.
  • WinRAR offers you the benefit of industry strength archive encryption using AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with a key of 128 bits.
  • WinRAR supports files and archives up to 8,589 billion gigabytes in size. The number of archived files is, for all practical purposes, unlimited.
  • WinRAR offers the ability to create selfextracting and multivolume archives.
  • Recovery record and recovery volumes allow to reconstruct even physically damaged archives.
  • WinRAR features are constantly being developed to keep WinRAR ahead of the pack.
Changes in Version 3.80:
1. Added support for ZIP archives containing Unicode file names in UTF-8 format. When creating ZIP archive, WinRAR stores names in Unicode only if they cannot be stored correctly using the current single byte character set.
2. Added decompression support for WinZip AES encrypted ZIP archives.
3. Improved Unicode support for RAR and ZIP archive names.
4. "Ask before overwrite" and "Skip existing files" update modes are now available in archiving dialog. They allow to specify WinRAR behavior when updating already existing files in archive. Unlike already available "Fresh existing files only" and "Add and update files", these new modes ignore file date and compare only file names.

Command line equivalents of these modes are:a) switch -o enables "Ask before overwrite" archiving mode;
cool.gif switch -o- enables "Skip existing files" archiving mode;
c) switch -o+ enables "Overwrite all" mode (default for archiving).

5. New "Add to context menu" option in "Profile parameters" dialog. If this option is on, the profile name will be displayed in Explorer context menus allowing to activate a profile from context menu.
6. New -cp switch allows to select a compression profile in command line mode. It is supported only by GUI WinRAR.exe, not by rar.exe.
7. New "Options" page of archiving dialog contains the group of settings modifying the behavior of "Delete files after archiving" option from "General" page:
a) Delete files. Delete files normally like in previous WinRAR versions.
cool.gif Move files to Recycle Bin. Deleted files are placed to Recycle Bin.
Command line equivalent of this option is -dr switch.
c) Wipe files. Before deleting file data are overwritten by zero bytes to prevent recovery of deleted files.
Command line equivalent of this option is -dw switch.

All these options have an effect only if "Delete files after archiving" is on. You can enable any of these options in the default compression profile to change the default behavior of "Delete files after archiving".

8. WinRAR "Extraction path and options" dialog is now resizable. You can use the mouse to drag its border to the desired size and provide more space for folder tree pane. WinRAR will store new dimensions of this dialog.
9. New "Update" SFX script command and "Update mode" group of options in "Update" page of "Advanced SFX options" dialog. These command and options allow to check time and implement file time based updating;
10. SFX script "Shortcut" command and "Add shortcut..." command in "Advanced SFX options" dialog now allow to specify an icon file containing an icon associated with shortcut.
11. New "Wipe temporary files" option in "Settings/Security" dialog provides more secure, though slower, way to delete temporary WinRAR files.
12. WinRAR and RAR display the total progress bar when unpacking a multivolume RAR archive if all volumes are present in the same folder.
13. WinRAR and RAR automatically expand names of environment variables in list files. For example, a list file can contain lines like:
%windir%\*.exe
%USERPROFILE%\Desktop

This feature is available only in Windows RAR version.

14. Added support of TAR archives with non-zero "extra field" data.
15. Added support of TAR archives, which does not contain the end of archive entry consisting of 512 zero bytes.
16. Improved Unicode support when dragging files from WinRAR window.
17. Shift+Tab key combination can be used in main WinRAR window to switch the input focus between interface elements (files, comment, tree, address) in reverse order. In previous versions Shift+Tab used the same order as Tab.
18. Corrected a possible WinRAR crash when opening truncated UDF ISO files.