Linux – Bulk UnRAR

If you’re not familiar with RAR files, they are like ZIP files. RAR is an archive format.

I had a collection of more than 150 RAR files in a single folder I needed to unrar (that is, open and extract from the archive). Doing them one at a time via KDE’s Ark software would work, but it would have taken a long time. Why spend that much time when I could automate the process.

Enter a loop bash script in KDE’s Konsole:

for i in *.rar; do unrar x "$i"; done

Here’s how the command works. The “for i in” part starts the loop (note: you can use any letter here). The “*.rar” component indicates that we want the loop to run through all the RAR files in the directory, regardless of the name of the file. The “do” command tells the loop what command to run. The “unrar x “$i”” component tells the software to use the unrar function which unpacks the archive. The “x” in that command tells the software to use the directory structure inside the RAR archive. The final piece of the loop after the second semi-colon – “done” – indicates what the terminal should do once the loop completes.

It took about 20 minutes to run through all the RAR files, but I used that time to create this tutorial. Doing this by hand would have taken me hours.