How to open/extract rar file on Lubuntu

If you come from windows world, you will be familiar with rar (winrar) files, it's one of the most popular compression format besides zip (winzip). In this article i will show you how to open/extract rar files on lubuntu.

You might be able to open the rar files on lubuntu, but you definitely can't extract or uncompress it, you will get an error like this:

And if you try to extract rar files from command line using 7z program, it will says error 'unsupported method'.

To extract rar files on lubuntu, we need to install package called p7zip-rar, this special package is for dealing with rar compression format.

Go ahead open your command line/console/terminal (press CTRL + ALT + T) and then run the command below to install p7zip-rar, this will enable support for rar files on lubuntu.

sudo apt-get install p7zip-rar

After the package installed, if you want to extract rar files, you need to do it from command line, i found that if i use GUI to extract it always error, even after p7zip-rar is installed.

So the best way to extract rar files is from command line using 7z command, but only after p7zip-rar package is installed.

7z x [name-of-the-rar-file]

Examples :

7z x mydocument.rar

7z x naughtypictures.rar

Alternative way to extract rar files on lubuntu

Just like 7zip, you can also extract rar files using dtrx program, dtrx is a special program for extracting for all kinds of file compression format.

You can install dtrx using this command:

sudo apt-get install dtrx

To extract rar files with dtrx, simply run dtrx followed by the name of the rar files, like this:

dtrx [name-of-the-rar-file]

Examples:

dtrx mydata.rar

dtrx secret-data.rar

~ goodluck ~