A third-party tool can aid in opening the RAR files and have solutions as easy as installing them for free. Thus, you won’t be surprised that there is no built-in utility for handling these files. Like we mentioned, the RAR format is proprietary. Now since you’re curious about how to open and extract RAR files on Mac, let’s get started with the options. Although the ZIP format is popular, yet it has several loopholes that RAR file formats can vitally address. It comes with benefits- some of which are small file sizes, the ability to split a file into multiple chunks, and the ease of recovering errors. This format came into existence to address the issues associated with the ZIP format. RAR is an abbreviation for Roshal ARchive- a Russian software engineers’ name that created the format. All you’ve to do is put the file for download, attach it to an email, and the receivers will only need to download one single file instead of downloading all the separate files. These are both achievable formats that help in compressing many files into one single file.

I look forward to any comments from the current and past developers of stuffit - they have a lot too answer for.A RAR has similarities to the ZIP file. Still, the tool has many customizable options to extract your archives the way you want. Like Keka, this tool doesn’t allow you to view what’s inside your RAR files before you extract them. Surely a company that has proprietary ownership of the Stuffit format(s) could a least maintain a commercial product that that can can Open ALL the crazy formats they have produced over the years.įinally a warning: ZIP, RAR, GZIP and the many other loss-less compression formats should never be run though stuffit ONLY perhaps if a tested uncorrupted backup exits, the likelihood of corruption of by stuffit, of these open compression formats is extremely high. Use The Unarchiver to Extract RAR Files The Unarchiver is a free RAR extractor for macOS you can use it to open any of your RAR archives in a single click. I maintain an old OS 7, OS 8 and OS 9 Macs (with comparable OLD versions of stuffit) for the purpose of opening old stuffit archives.

Step 2: Right-click on a RAR file and choose The Unarchive in the expanded options of Open With. Step 1: Go to Mac App Store, and download and install The Unarchiver. The Unarchiver is a free tool that you can get from the App Store to easily extract RAR files. New Stuffit products often cannot open stuffit archives produced by older versions of Stuffit. Open with RAR Opener for Mac: The Unarchiver. Instances of corrupted stuffit archives are common to the Mac community.

Having dealt with the whole Stuffit line for a decade or so (yeah I'm a old Mac guy) I have found it can produce corrupt archives, leading to costly re-production of projects. It has failed decompress RAR files for me and my clients years. Stuffit Expander IS *NOT* a reliable RAR expansion tool.

Macbook open rar file