binwalk (and friends) is all you need to extract arbitrary binary files | Notion

Today, I wanted to look inside my router firmware before I update my router. I downloaded and unzipped it. It's pretty big for a firmware.

Dilawar Singh on Notion

So apparently you don't need #UnRAR to extract #rar files because there are two #OpenSource projects that were made without proprietary bits.

1.) unrar-free is a maintained version of unrar-free from the Gna! CVS archive. It seems to only be able to do non-split rars but it should work.

2.) #unar is the command for extracting archives via #unarchiver. It works perfectly, the only thing is it uses different syntax than unrar so it is not a replacement via alias. (you can use the python wrapper I found to use it as a drop-in replacement.)

I used the wrapper to be a drop-in replacement and #patool found it and worked perfectly. (BTW patool is fucking amazing please use)

unrar-free: https://gitlab.com/bgermann/unrar-free

unarchiver: https://github.com/MacPaw/XADMaster

unar_wrapper: https://github.com/openSUSE/unrar_wrapper

patool: https://github.com/wummel/patool

Bastian Germann / unrar-free · GitLab

This is the unrar project exported from the Gna! CVS archive and ported to libarchive. The project is named unrar-free to distinguish it from the original, proprietary unrar.

GitLab
Patool - A Portable Command Line Archive File Manager - OSTechNix

Patool is a portable command line archive file manager that supports almost all archive formats in Unix-like operating systems.

OSTechNix