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I have been using UnRarX ( http://www.unrarx.com/ ) and it's free and works well, but often times I will download a rar file in the browser and click on it in the recent downloads lists which will extract it but not show it in the finder.

Ideally I'd like a small program which will extract a rar file and then show the contents / directory where it is extracted to.

I looked at the preferences for UnRarX but didn't see an option like this.

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4 Answers 4

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The Unarchiver works rather well for most .rar files — it might have issues with password protected or split archives though, at least in some older versions.

It supports a large number of archive formats and is as easy to use as BOMArchiveHelper : Double click and it extracts.

enter image description here

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  • What is BOMArchiveHelper ?
    – cwd
    Nov 15, 2011 at 21:14
  • @cwd BOMArchiveHelper, or "Archive Utility" since 10.5, is OS X's integrated zip/tar/gz/bz2 extraction tool.
    – Daniel Beck ♦
    Nov 15, 2011 at 21:16
  • cool. thanks. also - what applescript resources do you have in your toolbox? like script editors, debugging tools, etc? I know that's not related but i don't think you can PM on superuser.
    – cwd
    Nov 15, 2011 at 21:16
  • @cwd No problem. I actually only use AppleScript Editor (and only recently discovered its useful event log), Google, and lots and lots of time. Once you get over its quirks the documentation via the Library is almost all you need. Is there a specific problem you struggle with?
    – Daniel Beck ♦
    Nov 15, 2011 at 21:25
  • I'm just used to having more development tools available to troubleshoot problems, see values stored in variables, etc. How do you access the event log? Whenever I use applescript it's almost like taking a step backwards and I just thought I was doing something wrong. ScriptDebugger is kind of cool - you should try it sometime - but I was still hoping for something more.
    – cwd
    Nov 15, 2011 at 21:37
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If you like to work on the command line, the unrar utility is available via homebrew - you can install it with:

brew install --cask rar
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  • 16
    And here is the command for extracting: unrar e filename.
    – totymedli
    May 8, 2015 at 7:26
  • 28
    unrar x filename to extract with full path (that is what I usally want)
    – tato
    Jan 28, 2016 at 13:00
  • 4
    You can also get unrar with brew cask install rar, which has the added bonus of installing the rar utility for creating archives.
    – GDP2
    Feb 19, 2018 at 22:26
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The Unarchiver does that. You can also set it to open the files after extraction. Just open The Unarchiver.app after you've installed it, if you ever need to change the settings again.

enter image description here

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StuffIt expander works for rar and other archives and is free in the App Store.

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