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KevinRamirez's avatar
KevinRamirez
Bronze Contributor
Mar 24, 2025
Solved

RAR for mac - Does WinRAR work on mac

I have been a Windows 11 user, and I am used to using WinRAR to compress and decompress various files. I use it almost every day. I just bought a Mac recently, and I found that RAR for Mac is not as ...
  • Josew's avatar
    Josew
    Mar 24, 2025

    WinRAR only has a command-line interface for mac so WinRAR does not work well on Mac. You need to go with WinRAR alternative instead. 

    If you want a no-fuss way to deal with RAR files on macOS, just grab FossZIP, it did everything you need.

    See how it works: https://www.osxmac.com/how-to-open-rar-on-mac

     

     

Isaaccom's avatar
Isaaccom
Iron Contributor
Mar 24, 2025

I discovered this by mistake. Sometimes the .rar file contains plain text, code, or markdown. You can use the cat command to output it to the screen, and then copy it out and it can be used (of course, this is only an emergency, not a proper decompression method).

bash
cat filename.rar


If you see plain text data (such as JSON, XML, TXT), you can copy it out and save it as a file. Although it is not standard, it is also a trick to solve the problem of temporarily viewing the content of rar for mac.

Of course, this method cannot decompress pictures, audio, video, etc., and it is not a serious decompression method. But if you just want to see if there is any useful information in the .rar file and don’t want to install anything, it can really come in handy.

So if you ask me: Does WinRAR work on Mac? My answer is - although there is no original GUI version of WinRAR, if you want to see the content and get some text, there are actually ways to do it. The key is whether you want to use your brain to toss.

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