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Monday, October 20, 2008

Split rar files

Ever downloaded a file larger than 4Gb, then gone to copy it to a FAT32 USB drive? Unfortunately, FAT32 has a max filesize of 4Gb, so the operation fails.

One way of getting around this is compressing the file, in the hope that it gets small enough. If this still doesn't work, where does that leave you?

Using rar on the commandline, you are able to split files easily and quickly, for copying off to other sources.

First, install rar with sudo apt-get install rar

Usage is as easy as rar a -m5 -v500M archive.rar file.ext

rar starts the command
the a switch tells it to "add to archive"
-m5 is the compression level (0 don't compress, 3 default, 5 best compression but takes longest)
-v500M specifies volume size to 500Mb, you can also use something like -v512k for 512kbyte volumes, or -v5b for 5 byte volumes
You name your resulting archive with the name archive.rar (or whatever you'd like)
And the file you intend to compress with file.ext
You can also specify a folder as the target, just add a -R before the archive name to recurse subdirectories

To uncompress, right click on the first part01.rar file and choose Extract, or type rar x archive.part01.rar at the commandline

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