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These are not the droids you’re looking for.

Let me clear this up for all the people looking for .rar file converters (and trust me, there are many) : RAR files are simply archives, just like ZIP files. They contain other files and folders in a compressed form. The compression, encryption and volume splitting features of the RAR format are the reason it is often used when putting stuff online and sending big files over the Internet.

So you probably don’t need a “.rar converter” per se, but a way to extract RAR files. One program that can do this is 7-zip, a free file archiver that supports various compressed file formats. 7-zip can run on various operating systems including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Source code is also available for those so inclined. And if for some reason you can’t use this program check out other alternatives here.

By the way, if you were really, deliberately looking for a way to convert RAR files to another (archive) format, here’s how : extract the .rar file using 7zip or whatever, then pack the extracted files using another format. Simple. Most archivers (including 7zip) can compress to popular formats such as ZIP. It’s possible to automate this process but I won’t discuss that in-depth in this post. Hint : it involves command line

Phew. I believe this will be the last post of this file format-oriented kind for a while. I’ve run out of prepared topics anyway. Moderate rejoicing is surely in order, as those few regular readers I have *waves* are probably bored with these bland articles.