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JaydenWhite's avatar
JaydenWhite
Iron Contributor
Apr 28, 2025

How to open rar files on Windows 11?

Hi all, I recently switched to Windows 11 and am still getting familiar with the system. I have a few files downloaded in RAR format, but I'm not sure how to open them. Double click does not work at...
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LucasWilson's avatar
LucasWilson
Iron Contributor
Apr 28, 2025

Windows 11 comes with WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), which allows you to install a Linux environment and run a tool such as unzip or unar to open .rar file on Windows 11/10.. Although RAR requires additional tools to be installed, WSL is a built-in feature of Windows and is not considered third-party software.

1. Open PowerShell with administrator privileges and run the following command to install WSL. After the installation is complete, restart your computer.

wsl --install

2. Open the Start menu → Search for “Ubuntu” (or any other installed Linux distribution) → Open a terminal.

3. Install unraar, the official RAR decompression utility, p7zip-full, which supports more compression formats, via the WSL terminal.

sudo apt update && sudo apt install p7zip-full

4. Run the following command to open the RAR file from Windows 11/10.

7z x /mnt/c/Users/YourName/Downloads/file.rar -o/mnt/c/Users/YourName/Downloads/extracted/

The extracted file in .rar file will appear in C:\Users\YourName\Downloads\extracted\.

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