How to Open a RAR File in Ubuntu

A program called unrar is used to uncompress a .rar archive file in Linux. It is not installed by default in Ubuntu. To install it, simply run the command:

sudo apt-get install unrar

You will get

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  unrar
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 96.9kB of archives.
After this operation, 246kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://au.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/multiverse unrar 1:3.7.8-1 [96.9kB]
Fetched 96.9kB in 2s (34.9kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package unrar.
(Reading database ... 117487 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking unrar (from .../unrar_1%3a3.7.8-1_i386.deb) ...
Setting up unrar (1:3.7.8-1) ...

You can see that it requires the multiverse repository. So if your installation complains something, try to update your source.list first. To unrar .rar files, simply use command:

[email protected]$ unrar x

See the man page for more options:

[email protected]$ man unrar

Have fun….