Command line tools

The Unarchiver is a Mac OS X app, but the underlying unarchiving code can run on other OSes, too. There is not yet any GUI app for any other OS, but there are two command-line tools, unar and lsar, which can be used on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.

Mac OS X

Pre-compiled versions for Mac OS X are available on the Google Code download page:

http://theunarchiver.googlecode.com/files/unar1.6.zip

For older Mac OS X versions, use the legacy version:

http://theunarchiver.googlecode.com/files/unar1.6_legacy.zip

Windows

The Windows versions are currently cross-compiled with Cocotron on OS X. You find download binary versions on the Google Code download page:

http://theunarchiver.googlecode.com/files/unar1.6_win.zip

Ubuntu

Ubuntu 12.04 packages unar and lsar, under the package name "unar". You can install them from the Software Center, or using the command line:

sudo apt-get install unar

Other Linuxes

Some other distros also package unar, but since I do not use them, I am not sure how to install them. Debian probably handles it similarly to Ubuntu above, and I think Gentoo also has some way to install it. If anyone wants to supply me with instructions for those, I will add them here.

You can also download the source code and compile the tools by hand. To do this, you will need to find and install the required third-party libraries that the XADMaster library depends on (GNUstep, zlib, libbzip2, OpenSSL, and ICU). How to do that depends on which distribution you are using. On Ubuntu, the following should work:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libgnustep-base-dev libz-dev libbz2-dev libssl-dev libicu-dev
cd XADMaster
make -f Makefile.linux

New in 1.6:

• Added switch for quiet mode.
• Added contributed bash completion scripts.
• Fix a bug that would make files with invalid filenames not work in Zip and Exe files.
• Fix some small memory leaks.
• Fix a bug with parsing Tar files.

New in 1.5:

• Added support for the Internet Archive WARC format.
• Fixed bugs in XAR/.pkg, CAB, HQX and Compress.
• Fixed a few more rare bugs and crashes.
• Made the OS X binaries work on 10.6 and 10.7 again.

New in 1.4:

• Added support for password-protected 7z files.
• Better support for very old StuffIt archives, including password-protected ones.
• Fixed some crashes on old OS X versions.
• Various bugfixes for PDF, hqx and sitx.
• Make lsar testing report wrong passwords properly.
• Make Windows versions stop printing meaningless warnings.

New in 1.3:

• Bugfixes for Tar and PDF extraction.

New in 1.2:

• Support for extracting bitmap images from PDF files.
• Support for AppleSingle files.
• Experimental support for extracting Mac data forks in HFV Explorer style on Windows.
• Fix some crashing and other issues on Windows.
• Bugfixes.

New in 1.1:

• Fixed extraction of partial RAR files.

New in 1.0:

• Finalized interface.
• Support for old High Sierra CD images.
• Support for LZMA2 in 7z.
• Support for multi-volume StuffIt files.
• Fixed some self-extracting LZH files. (That means Touhou 7.5.)
• Filename encoding handling bugfixes.
• Zip64 fixes.
• Symlinks in zip files were broken.
• Less crashing on supported and unsupported sitx files.
• Fixed junk added to the ends of uncompressed encrypted files in RAR.
• Bugfixes for DiskDoubler, tar and MacBinary.

New in 0.99:

• The command-line interface has changed drastically. Things have been renamed, moved around and lots of stuff has been added.
• The JSON code output by lsar in JSON mode has also changed.
• unar now has interactive prompts to deal with file collisions and similar things. There are also options to override the prompts.
• unar can now enclose extracted files in subdirectories, much like The Unarchiver. There are various command-line options to control the behavior.
• lsar now has a long format (-l) which displays more information about files.
• The programs now exit with error codes on errors.
• The Windows version no longer needs the OpenSSL dll file, and now only relies on Foundation1.0.dll.
• There is now a separate source code archive for unar and lsar. It contains mostly the same as the The Unarchiver source archive, except for the GUI-specific parts.
• Support for Mac OS X extended attributes in Zip, Tar, and Xar. Also supports setting Spotlight comments from archive comment fields.
• Support for extracting resources from Flash SWF files. Embedded images and sounds can be extracted into separate files.
• Support for Ar and Deb archives.
• Support for self-extracting 7z.
• Support for LBR with embedded crunched and squeezed files.
• Better support for huge Zip files.
• Better support for old StuffIt (thanks to Friendly Archivist),
• Bugfixes for Zip, RAR, Tar, Cpio, HQX, CAB, Zoo, PackIt.