Is there an app or script that will extract .rar files for Mac OS X?

Question

...after it completed download that runs similiar to how zip files unextract itself when the download finishes and actually throws the zipped copy in the trash? I usually use unrax but lately with all these .rar files, the cool zip extractor is not very helpful right now. A script with automator? anything to make this easier when extracting compressed files such as .rar.

Thank you.

Running Mac OS X 10.6

Answer 1

7 zip should do the trick www.7-zip.org

Answer 2

The Unarchiver should do the trick and is free! It works basically like the default decompressor bundled with OS X.

As for setting theses files to be automatically extracted when they finish downloading, that depends on your browser. If you're using Chrome, this is as simple as clicking on the little arrow next to the downloaded file in the downloads bar and selecting "Always open files of this type". I don't know how to this in Firefox (extension?) or Safari.

Answer 3

The automating is the hard part. This doesn't meet all your requirements as some of the software is not free, but I thought it still worth mentioning.

I download a lot of .RARs from Usenet, and before Unison 2 came out (which has automatic Un-RARing of files after download - and is not free) I had to roll my own solution similar to what you're looking for.

Basically I used a combination of Hazel (not free) and UnRarX (free) to do the job. I downloaded all of my RARs to a folder that Hazel watched. When they were fully downloaded (I told Hazel not to do anything until the files were 30min to an hour old) Hazel would open the .PAR2 or .RAR file in UnRarX and then move the unpacked file to a different folder. Once moved, Hazel would then clean the download folder.

It's definitely not a one click solution, but I made a few different workflows to handle different types of files (music, video, etc.) and get them unpacked and sorted where I wanted.

To go totally free you could write some AppleScript and set it as a folder action to do a similar job to Hazel.