Latest WinRAR updates

WinRAR 7.20 Beta 3​

WinRAR 7.20 Beta 3 changes:

• Original and packed file size column widths in "l" and "v" commandsare increased by 1 symbol, so 10 digit file sizes are also displayed aligned by these commands.
• If "Reuse existing window" option is enabled when opening an archive, but another WinRAR copy is busy with archive processing, the archive is opened by current copy. Previously neither of copies opened it.

Bugs fixed:

• previous beta failed to open archives in ZIP format with extra fields shorter than 4 bytes, such as some APK files;
• "Ask" option in WinRAR "Settings/Viewer/Viewer type" didn't display the viewer type prompt for PNG files and several other image formats;
• -ag switch 'k' modifier used English week day names even in localized versions.

WinRAR 7.20 Final​

Changelog:

Performance improvements when deleting files in solid RAR archives

• If there are no non-zero files after deleted files, archive recompressing isn't performed.
• Part of archive before deleted files is copied as is, without repacking. Its contents are unpacked to memory if necessary, but not recompressed.
• Semi-solid archive processing involves only solid blocks containing deleted files. Unaffected solid blocks are copied as is.

"Generate archive name by mask" archiving option and -ag command line switch

• New 'K' format character defines the current day of week name as a text string.
• New 'O' format character defines the current month name as a text string regardless of format character number. Unlike "MMM" mask, it allows using names shorter or longer than 3 characters, such as -agOO.
• Excessive format characters exceeding the available field width are now ignored instead of appending to the archive name. This allows using full month or weekday names by providing enough format characters, e.g., -agKKKKKKKKKK.

Command line -s switch

• Switch -s accepts an optional parameter preceded by '='.
• Switches -s, -se, -sv, -sv-, -s- are replaced by -s=f, -s=e, -s=v, -s=d, -s=-. Previous versions are still supported but may be removed in future.
• Multiple modifiers can be combined in the same switch, e.g., -s=e100f.
• New switch -s=r resets solid statistics before adding new files to an existing archive.

Switch -tk

• Now accepts an optional date parameter in YYYYMMDDHHMMSS format.
• If used without a parameter when modifying an archive, it preserves the original archive time.
• If a parameter is provided, it sets the archive modification time.
• Separators like - or : can be inserted, and trailing fields can be omitted, e.g., -tk2025-06-01.

"Specified time" option

• Added to "Set archive time to" on the "Time" page of the archiving dialog.
• Allows manually entering a time for newly created or modified archives.

UTF-8 output format

• Added to "Generate report" command with optional byte order mark.

"Cloud files" option

• Added to "Where to check for SFX archives" in "Settings/Integration/Context menu items..." dialog.
• If off, WinRAR shell extension will not attempt to detect SFX archives for executable cloud files not available locally, improving speed.
• Relies on cloud file attributes and may be ignored if unsupported by the cloud service.

"Copy to clipboard" button

• Added to the bottom of "Search results" dialog.
• Copies current results of "Find files" command to the clipboard.

Large archive opening improvements

• Reduces time to open archives with many files and folders.
• Most noticeable for ZIP archives containing millions of files.

TAR extraction speed improvements

• Improves extraction of TAR and TAR-based archives (e.g., .tar.gz, .tar.xz).
• Most visible on slower hard drives with large archives containing many files.

SFX module environment variable

• Sets sfxnamenoext variable containing the SFX archive name without path or extension.
• Can be used to append the archive name to a user-defined path, e.g., Path=c:\Util\%sfxnamenoext%.

"minsize" parameter in -oi switch

• Now supports optional trailing unit size characters.
• Example: -oi:1m is equivalent to -oi:1048576.

Switch -x path recognition

• Now recognizes exclude paths with both Windows and Unix style separators.
• Example: -xfolder\file and -xfolder/file now exclude the same file.

Bugs fixed

• "Files to exclude" field was ignored for all but the first ZIP archive when "Put each file to separate archive" was enabled.
• "Use for all archives" option in the password prompt for "Convert archives" command was previously available only for encrypted archives with file name encryption. Now it works for all archives

WinRAR 7.21 Beta 1​

Highlights

• Improved archive recognition – Correctly handles archives with wrong extensions; nested archives are displayed properly.
• File list sorting – First click on size or time columns now sorts in reverse (largest/latest first), like Windows Explorer.
• Case-insensitive extension check – -s=e switch no longer resets solid statistics for extensions differing only by case.
• SFX elevation handling – Extraction silently quits if admin prompt is canceled, avoiding folder access errors.

Bug fixes:

• ZIP extraction now supports file comment fields.
• -tl switch correctly sets latest time with RAR 7.20 "ch" command.
• Device names like aux are automatically replaced during extraction.
• Exporting settings no longer overwrites folder shortcuts.

WinRAR 7.21 Final

1. WinRAR properly recognizes archives with a wrong file extension,
containing an archive in another format stored without compression.
For example, if host.rar, storing nested.zip inside, was renamed to
host.zip, WinRAR 7.20 could display nested.zip contents when opening
such host.zip. This version displays host.zip contents.

2. Similarly to Windows Explorer, the first click on size and time columns
in WinRAR file list sets the reverse sort mode with largest and latest
files at the top.

3. Switch -s=e performs the case insensitive file extension comparison
in Windows. Unlike previous versions, solid statistics isn't reset
anymore for file extensions differing only by case.

4. If self-extracting archive attempts to extract files to a folder
requring administrator rights and elevation prompt is cancelled by user,
the archive quits silently instead of issuing the folder access error.

5. Bugs fixed:

a) WinRAR 7.20 could produce a broken archive when deleting files from
solid archives in old RAR4 format. As a result of this fix, deleting
files in solid RAR4 archives now involves the full archive repacking,
similar to WinRAR versions preceding 7.20. It doesn't affect archives
in the modern RAR5 format;

b) with a rare combination of source data type and compression
parameters, WinRAR 7.x could crash when compressing source data.
Such crash was more likely when processing large amount of poorly
compressible data;

c) WinRAR 7.20 couldn't unpack ZIP archives containing file comment
fields;

d) switch -tl didn't set the latest time when used with RAR 7.20
"ch" command;

e) extraction command didn't automatically replace device names
like "aux", when unpacking archives containing such reserved names;

f) if folder shortcut was double clicked in "Save WinRAR settings as"
dialog when exporting WinRAR settings, folder shortcut itself was
overwritten with settings data instead of opening a target folder.

Who didn't grow up with WinRAR?
WinRAR holds a special place in history for me. It's the first application I install on a clean Windows installation.

Stigg said:

Who didn't grow up WinRAR?
WinRAR holds a special place in history for me. It's the first application I install on a clean Windows installation.

Click to expand...

Yep, I bought the licence 17 years ago and it's still used daily.

z3r010 said:

Yep, I bought the licence 17 years ago and it's still used daily.

View attachment 170186

Click to expand...

WinZip was the first archiving application I used.

The early versions of WinZip were okay, but it turned bad (in my opinion) over the years trying to add too many features that I wasn't interested in. I switched to WinRAR which was simple and lean, and I've never gone back. Besides that, back in the day WinZip didn't support the .RAR format.

I started with PKZIP and PKUNZIP for MS-DOS. Naturally, I switched to WinZIP since Windows 3.1 However, there were some formats that old versions of WinZIP could not open including .RAR files, so I used WinRAR for these and WinACE for some obsolete archive formats of 8-bit home computers (I play old games using respective emulators). I know I might never encounter one, but I hate the idea that I do encounter one and cannot open the file. Of course when I clean install Windows on another computer I don't install all three, I just install WinRAR to open all well known archive files (don't care about the rare formats) and make sure .CAB, .JAR and .ISO files are excluded. I also noticed that WinRAR opens much faster the .ZIP files compared to WinZIP. Two useful features that I use in WinRAR are the ability to easy find the last used extraction path and the ability to compress a series of images into a .CBR comic book file which can be opened with a suitable comic reader application. This is basically a .RAR file with the file extension replaced by .CBR

WinRAR 7.22

Changelog

• Deleting from solid archives reverted to pre-7.20 state to finalize the fix in WinRAR 7.21 and avoid potential checksum errors.

There was some impressive writing about this tool in the past something regarding its popup which can be easily fixed I mean the trial version. Anyway, one of the first tools you must install on a new machine.