RAR - What's new in the latest version Version 4.20 1.

Changes in RAR compression: a) Multithreaded RAR compression is enabled by default. You can disable it with -mt1 switch. Comparing to RAR 4.11, some speed gain is possible in single processor mode as well. Speed gain depends on data type and average file size. Several cores are utilized more efficiently when compressing large files. b) we had to increase memory requirements to achieve higher compression speed. General RAR compression algorithm allocates about 120 MB comparing to 40 MB in RAR 4.11; c) RAR text compression algorithm cannot utilize several CPU cores efficiently, so its performance in multiprocessor environment is much lower than for general algorithm. Also its decompression speed is much lower than in general algorithm regardless of CPU number. So we decided to disable the text algorithm by default. If you need maximum possible compression ratio for plain text data regardless of speed, you can enable the text compression with -mct switch. 2. RAR general decompression algorithm speed is slightly improved, though not to same extent as RAR compression. RAR decompression is not able to use several processor cores, so its performance does not depend on a number of cores. Version 4.11 1. Bugs fixed: a) if -x*\somedir\* exclusion mas was specified when archiving and if name of current directory contained 'somedir', RAR could exclude all files and stop creating an archive. Version 4.10 1. Modifications of switch -ag behavior: a) -ag can be used with all RAR commands, not just with archiving only; b) 'N' format character behavior differs in archiving and non-archiving operations. When archiving, it is incremented until the first unused name is found. In non-archiving operations li e extracting it selects the existing archive preceding the first unused name; c) 'I' format character allows to specify minutes regardless of presence and position of 'H' (hours) in format string. It can be used instead of 'M' (minutes), when you wish to place minutes before

hours or do not need hours at all. 2. New -log[fmt][=name] switch allows to write archive and file names to log file in archiving, extracting, deleting and listing commands. This switch is especially useful, when you need to further process an archive created with -ag or -v switches, because -log provides the archive name generated by RAR. 3. New -@[+] switch allows to process all parameters starting from '@' character either as file names (-@) or as file lists (-@+). 4. Volume size in -v<size> switch can be specified as a decimal fraction. Dot (.) is used as the decimal mar . For example, -v1.5g means 1.5 gigabytes. Version 4.01 1. Bugs fixed: a) "Repair" command failed to properly reconstruct structure of RAR archives, which contained at least one file with pac ed size exceeding 4 GB. This bug did not affect the recovery record based repair. It happened only if recovery record was not found and RAR performed reconstruction of archive structure; b) RAR could crash when creating a new archive with -agNNNN switch if archive number in generated name was very large, li e a thousand or more. Version 4.00 1. RAR decompression speed is improved. Depending on data type, decompression can be up to 30% faster than in previous versions. Both the general RAR algorithm and most of special RAR multimedia methods benefit from this improvement. The only module of RAR algorithm, which is not affected, is "Text compression" method. 2. Changes in -x<file> switch syntax. Now you can specify a wildcard exclusion mas for folders. Such mas must have the trailing '\' character, li e -x*tmp*\ or -x*\temp\ 3. Recovery volume processing involves less dis see operations resulting in higher performance. 4. New error code 10 ("no files") is added to list of error codes. This new code can be returned by archive, extract, delete and repair commands. It means that RAR did not find any files matched the specified file or archive mas . Version 3.93 1. Bugs fixed: a) in RAR 3.92 -xd:\path\dir switch could also exclude directories,

which path does not match the path specified in the switch and only the directory name is the same as specified; b) switches -y -or did not wor correctly together. Switch -or was ignored in presence of -y. Version 3.92 1. In RAR 3.91 -x<mas > switch could also exclude directories from archiving even if mas contained wilcard characters and did not contain a path. For example, -x*. excluded all those directories, which do not have the extension in the name. Now -x switch uses RAR 3.80 approach for mas s without path, excluding directories only if mas does not contain wildcards and matches the directory name exactly 2. If file matched two different mas s in RarFiles.lst, RAR could select the last match. Normally, if neither of mas s is a subset of another, the first match must be chosen. Version 3.91 1. Bugs fixed: a) hexadecimal search in "ih" command failed to find matches if first byte in search string was greater than 127. Version 3.90 1. New command line switch -r- disables recursion completely. So 'rar a -r- arc dirname' command will add only the empty dirname folder and ignore its contents. By default, if dirname does not include wildcards, RAR adds its contents even if -r switch is not specified. 2. If used when extracting, the new command line switch -ai forces RAR to ignore file attributes. When using this switch, extracted files will always have attributes assigned by operating system to a newly created file by default. 3. If output file name is not specified in "cw" command, RAR will send comment data to stdout. 4. When compressing stdin data with -si[name] switch, RAR sets modification time of archived entry to current system time. Previous RAR versions did not fill this field, resulting in meaningless modification time for stdin.