RAR

File Format
Name	RAR
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Archiving RAR
Extension(s)	.rar
MIME Type(s)	application/x-rar-compressed
PRONOM	x-fmt/264

Roshal ARchive (RAR) is a proprietary file format used by the compression software WinRAR. They make the decompression code available for use in other programs and allow its distribution, but with a license provision that "You cannot use the unrar source to re-create the RAR compression algorithm, which is proprietary."

File identification

Current versions start their files with (hex) 52 61 72 21 1A 07 00. Early versions (for which no format documentation is known) start with 52 45 7E 5E.

Links

• Wikipedia article
• WinRAR website
• Free UnRAR.dll
• UnRAR source
• Forensics Wiki article (has lots of format details)