Free software to support the RARv3 archive format has been listed on our High Priority Projects list for some time now. We've always had ways to create and extract free archive formats, using tools like GNU tar and Info-ZIP. The RARv3 format is proprietary, so we don't want it to replace these tools, but it's not uncommon to see it used for distributing multimedia files over the Internet. That means the lack of free software to extract RARv3 files has been sorely felt.

We're happy to share the news that there's now a free software project to fill this gap, and we can mark this item as done. Unar is a small collection of software written by Dag Ågren. It includes two core utilities, unar and lsar, that read and extract archives in many different formats, including RARv3. These run on GNU/Linux, as well as Mac and Windows. All of the code is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1, with the option to use later versions of the license, so it will be easy to reuse in other projects that want to include support for RARv3.

There are lots of ways that would-be contributors can help make these tools more useful for free software users. unar and lsar aren't conveniently packaged in most distributions, so that would be a great start. We'd also love to see these programs integrated with existing graphical extraction tools, like File Roller and Ark.

We'd like to thank Dag Ågren for the time and effort he's put in to this important free software project; it's an invaluable contribution to the community. If you need a tool to extract RARv3 archives, look no further than unar and lsar.