cannot unrar

[simyonce]

hi everyone,
i'm very new to Linux, though not to computers actually. i'm using Ubuntu 5.10.

my problem is i have files in .rar format, and cannot handle unrar-ing.
i've installed unrar-free but when i run the command, it fails unrar-ing:

Extracting exercise/work.txt Failed
Extracting exercise/work_out.txt Failed

it's necessary to be able to extract my files since most of them are rar-ed,

any simple help will be appreciated...

[sjain]

what is the command you r giving to unrar the file on ur system???

[brother_mick]

Have you got the correct permissions to unrar those files ? doing ls -l in the directory that contains those files will tell you. Just my thoughts.

[fingal]

Do you have all the files in the rar archive in the same folder? If not things can be difficult because rar will expect all of them to be there, reading them as part of the same file.

[simyonce]

what is the command you r giving to unrar the file on ur system???

the command is unrar-free name-of-file.rar
extract mode is default it says, so i did not write unrar-free -x name-of-file.rar (ir does also not work)

i do not know if i have the permission, will try ls -l but what is a permission, why do i need to have it?

and lastly, yes, all the files are in one single folder...

i heard sth called fileroller, is it a kind of software like winrar for unraring files?

[spoon!]

Have you tried (nonfree) unrar? I use that and it works well. To install it, make sure "non-free" is in your apt sources, then do "apt-get install unrar". Then do "unrar x whatever.rar" to extract stuff.

[brother_mick]

File permissions dictate what operations a user can do to a file, basicaly you have r - read, w - write, x - execute. And these are in 3 groups u - the user who owns the file, g - users who belong to the same group as the user who owns the file, and o - all others.

You`ll notice the 1st letter you see is `d` that means backup is a directory rather than a file. Then you see another 9 letters, they are rwx for each of the 3 groups.

:~$ ls -l
total 17
drwxr-xr-x 2 mick mick 1024 2005-12-16 09:28 backup
-rw-r--r-- 1 mick mick 806 2006-02-07 12:37 firewall_changelog
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3257 2006-02-03 14:25 firewall-current
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3576 2006-01-10 14:56 firewall-new~
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 1835 2006-01-10 21:45 firewall-old
-rw-r--r-- 1 mick mick 2488 2005-10-24 05:27 mike-firewall-examples
-rwxr--r-- 1 mick mick 65 2005-12-16 04:59 ssh_restart
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mick mick 83 2006-02-08 12:02 test.sh


I probably haven`t made a good job of explaining this, but there are many good tutorials on the web for you to read.

Hope that helped.

[hrh]

hi,
look at to this note:
"Unarchiver for .rar files
Unrar can extract files from .rar archives. Can't handle archives in the
RAR 3.0 format, only the non-free "unrar" package can do that.

Homepage: https://gna.org/projects/unrar/"
as you can see above it can't extract files from .rar 3.0 format! you should use non-free unrar!

Ya Ali