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Long title. Anyway, I haven't been able to find an answer to this question.

I know the password to the RAR file, I locked it myself, but now all I want to do is remove the password because it's too much of a pain in the butt to type it in every time. Is there a way to do this in WinRAR or an equivalent program? The only thing I knew to do was to extract it, then create a new RAR without the password.

It's not a life-or-death issue, but it would be nice to know. Thanks for your time!

EDIT: I just saw a bunch of related questions that appear to ask the same thing. The only solution I saw was using a DOS command to yadda yadda yadda. Here it is: How to remove password protection from compressed files

Is there an easier way? Thanks again!

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First, those aren't DOS commands, they're just running programs with some command-line arguments. Second, all those commands do are extract the archive, delete it, and re-compress the files again. This is the only way to do what you want, see my answer below. – Breakthrough Aug 30 '11 at 14:50
What @Breakthrough said - that's just unpacking and repacking them, it even says so explicitly. This is the only way to do it. – Shinrai Aug 30 '11 at 14:51
Thanks, guys! I see now. I didn't check it out thoroughly. – Abluescarab Aug 31 '11 at 3:11
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No, you can not. Version 3 of the RAR file format (implemented first in WinRAR 2.9) encrypts the actual data itself, as well as the file headers (if requested). It is impossible to simply "remove" the password from an archive, since the data itself is encrypted with the password. Even if WinRAR did have a "remove password" feature, it would essentially have to do the same thing (extract the files, delete the source archive, and re-compress the files).

Logically, if you think about it, this should be the only way of doing this... Otherwise, why would you bother encrypting the files if the actual compressed data itself wasn't encrypted? It would be trivial to just strip off the file header and decompress the RAR bitstream if the files weren't encrypted.

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No, logically, it should be possible to decrypt the data without decompressing it, because it's encrypted compressed data, not compressed encrypted data. (the latter is fundamentally impossible, due to entropy increases from encryption). It's just an obscure enough thing to want to do that it's omitted. – Random832 Aug 30 '11 at 18:00
Right. If he had just PGP encrypted the RAR, he could have easily decrypted it without recompressing it. – smackfu Aug 30 '11 at 20:57
Well, thanks for explaining it! It's rather disappointing, because I honestly believe this should be a feature, but I suppose not enough people want this feature to justify including it. – Abluescarab Aug 31 '11 at 3:20
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up vote 1 down vote

You have to decompress and then recompress into a new RAR file. Then simply delete the old encrypted file and you've got yourself a fresh new RAR package without the unneeded password.

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how about you create a new unprotected rar file (eg containing an empty folder) then open the old protected one and drag the files into the new unprotected rar? no extracting needed, right?

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