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- RAR - What's new in the latest version
-
-
- Version 3.30
-
- 1. New "Scan archive for viruses" command unpacks an archive to
- temporary folder and checks its contents with antivirus software
- installed on a user's computer.
-
- 2. New "Generate report" command creates a report containing
- the list of usual or archived files. You may optionally include
- a file size, date and CRC to report, choose the sort order,
- save report to file, send it to printer or copy to clipboard.
-
- 3. New "Benchmark and hardware test" command allows to compare
- performance of RAR compression algorithm on different computers
- and detect possible errors caused by hardware failures.
-
- 4. New "Print file" command is able to print both archived
- and usual files.
-
- 5. New "Tools" menu contains "Wizard", "Show information",
- "Convert archives", "Find files", "Repair", "Convert to SFX"
- commands previously available in "Commands" menu and new
- "Scan archive for viruses", "Generate report", "Benchmark
- and hardware test" commands.
-
- 6. WinRAR supports decompression of ZIP archives created using
- "Enhanced deflate" method.
-
- 7. WinRAR pre-allocates disk space for files unpacked
- from ZIP archives. It helps to reduce disk fragmentation,
- especially on NTFS disks. Previous versions did it only
- for RAR archives.
-
- 8. Now it is possible to decompress TAR, GZIP and ISO9660
- archives of any size. Previous versions could not handle
- files of these formats, if they exceeded 2 GB.
-
- 9. Status bar displays the current operation progress,
- when reading contents of large tar.gz and tar.bz2 archives.
-
- 10. "Next volume" dialog allows to modify not only a name,
- but also a size of next volume, so you may create volumes
- of different size. This dialog is displayed if you create
- volumes on removable disks or set "Pause after each volume"
- option in "Advanced" part of archiving dialog.
-
- 11. Several -v<size> switches can be specified in the command
- line mode to set different sizes for different volumes.
- For example, 'rar a -v100k -v200k -v300k arcname' command
- sets 100 KB size for first volume, 200KB for second
- and 300KB for all following volumes.
-
- 12. More WinRAR commands support Unicode in archive names.
- If your Windows is NT based (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, 2003),
- you may modify archives with non-English names regardless
- of Regional Settings.
-
- 13. Small and some of large icons have been updated by
- Francesco Indrio.
-
- 14. "Diagnostic message" window can be resized. It preserves
- new dimensions and restores them when activated the next time.
-
- 15. "Mode..." button in the archiving progress window allows to
- change the compression method and "Turn PC off when done"
- option on the fly.
-
- 16. WinRAR supports -cfg- switch in the command line mode.
- It forces WinRAR to ignore options saved in the default
- compression profile and RAR environment variable.
-
- 17. WinRAR opens .qpr and .qpk files (QNX packages) in one step,
- like it already does for .tar.gz archives.
-
- 18. Extraction command proposes to browse for missing CAB file
- in multivolume CAB sequence instead of "Cannot open" error.
-
- 19. "Rename" command displays a window with information about
- processing files.
-
- 20. "Convert" command checks the lowest allowed ratio before
- starting the archive test, so if resulting archive is too large,
- WinRAR does not waste time to test it.
-
- 21. "Files to exclude" field in the archiving dialog has "Append"
- button now, so you may browse for excluded files instead of
- entering their names manually.
-
- 22. WinRAR understands quotes inside of parameters in the command
- line mode. For example, "-pmy password" and -p"my password"
- will set the same password. Eariler WinRAR understood only
- the first syntax ("-pmy password") and only the console RAR
- handled both.
-
- 23. Data analyzing module is tuned to detect executable and audio
- data more accurately. Erroneous selecting of executable
- and audio algorithms could reduce the compression ratio
- in some situations.
-
- 24. WinRAR understands the command line switch -hp without
- a parameter and requests to enter a password when processing it.
-
- 25. WinRAR preserves NTFS streams of updated archives, if archive
- and temporary files are resided on NTFS partition. For example,
- if you entered some comments in "Summary" section of archive
- properties, they will not be lost when updating an archive
- using WinRAR. Do not confuse NTFS streams of archive itself
- and streams of archived files, latter can be preserved
- by previous versions as well.
-
- 26. It is possible to prohibit change of archiving password
- with "WinRAR\Policy\Password" Registry value. This feature
- may help to avoid encrypting of important data in multi-user
- environment. Read "Configuration settings/Registry variables"
- help topic for details.
-
- 27. "Select toolbar buttons" dialog allows to specify separators
- after any toolbar button.
-
- 28. New console RAR -si[name] switch to compress data from stdin
- (standard input).
-
- 29. Console RAR 'vt' and 'lt' commands display symlink target names,
- when listing RAR/Unix archives contained symbolic links.
- These commands also display NTFS stream names, when listing
- WinRAR archives contained streams.
-
-
- Version 3.20
-
- 1. Previous WinRAR and RAR versions stored only the file modification
- time and only in DOS FAT format with 2 seconds precision.
- While it was enough for FAT, modern file systems provide a higher
- precision. Now RAR format can preserve modification, creation and
- last access time with the precision up to 0.0000001 second.
- The following changes had been done to support this facility:
-
- a) new "Time" part of archiving dialog includes "File time to store"
- options controlling file time processing. Other time related
- options also had been moved from "Backup" to "Time" section;
-
- b) new "Advanced" part of extraction dialog contains "File time"
- options allowing to select time fields to restore;
-
- c) command line -ts<m,c,a> switch chooses time fields to process
- and precision of these fields;
-
- Time precision provided by ZIP format is not changed and equal
- to 2 seconds.
-
- 2. Changes in the extraction dialog:
-
- a) extraction dialog has been split to "General" and "Advanced"
- parts;
-
- b) "Display files in Explorer" option in "General" part instructs
- WinRAR to open Explorer window and display contents of
- destination folder when extraction is done;
-
- c) "Save settings" button saves the current state of both parts
- ("General" and "Advanced"). Saved state will be used as
- the default when activating the dialog next time. WinRAR saves
- all options except the destination path;
-
- d) "Advanced" part includes "File time" options allowing to
- select time fields to restore;
-
- e) new "Set file security" option in "Advanced" part controls
- restoring of NTFS file security information. Previous versions
- always extracted this information.
-
- 3. It is possible to rename files inside of RAR archives.
- It can be done either with "Rename file" command in "Commands"
- menu or in the context menu displaying on the right mouse click.
- In the command line mode you may use 'rn' command for this
- purpose.
-
- 4. "Next volume" dialog allows to choose the disk or folder for
- a new volume. WinRAR displays this dialog when creating volumes
- on removable disks or if "Pause after each volume" option
- is switched on. Previous versions did not allow to modify
- the volume name here.
-
- 5. "Test" and "Convert" commands can be applied to archives
- directly from Explorer context menu. By default these menu
- items are disabled, but you may enable them in WinRAR
- "Settings/Integration/Context menu items..." dialog.
-
- 6. "Pause" item added to context menu displayed on the right mouse
- button click on WinRAR tray icon. So you may pause WinRAR minimized
- to tray and continue it without restoring WinRAR to normal window.
-
- 7. If one of SFX volumes is missing, SFX archive displays
- "Next volume" dialog proposing to browse for required volume.
-
- 8. WinRAR allows to resize the window containing results of "Find"
- command. It saves modified window dimensions and restores them
- when using "Find" next time.
-
- 9. Toolbar:
-
- a) "Toolbars..." button in "Settings/General" activates the dialog
- allowing to turn on or off the main WinRAR toolbar, the additional
- small toolbar containing "Up one level" button and the address bar
- with path or archive information;
-
- b) buttons may have a variable width. So few large button titles
- in localized versions will not increase the total toolbar size
- too much like it happened before;
-
- c) if the width of buttons exceeds the width of toolbar,
- you may click on the small arrow at the right side of toolbar
- and choose hidden buttons from the menu.
-
- 10. Console RAR 'lb' and 'vb' commands list contents of archive
- in the bare mode - file names without any additional information.
-
- 11. WinRAR recognizes one more tar long file name extension
- designed to overcome 100 characters file name limit in tar archives.
-
- 12. Gzip archives contained zero in the file time field are processed
- correctly. Previous versions could display random date values
- for such archives.
-
- 13. Recovery volumes:
-
- a) when creating recovery volumes, the required disk space
- is preallocated in the beginning of operation. It helps to
- minimize the disk fragmentation;
-
- b) console RAR displays the operation percentage when creating
- recovery volumes or reconstructing missing or corrupt volumes.
-
- 14. If "Save file security" option is enabled, folders will be
- archived after files which they contain. It is necessary to avoid
- the situation when security attributes of just unpacked folder
- do not allow to extract files to it.
-
- 15. Optional description can be entered in "Add to favorite" dialog.
- If such description is available, WinRAR will display it
- in "Favorites" menu instead of folder or archive name.
-