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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

unrar didn't work on Ubuntu 16.04, but rar did:

    $ unrar e shakespeare.part001.rar
    unknown archive type, only plain RAR 2.0 supported(normal and solid archives), SFX and Volumes are NOT supported!
    All OK
    $ sudo apt install rar
    $ rar x shakespeare.part001.rar
    ...         shakespeare.html                                          OK 
    All OK

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it worked for me on ubuntu 16.04

    $ unrar e shakespeare.part001.rar 

    UNRAR 5.30 beta 2 freeware      Copyright (c) 1993-2015     Alexander Roshal


    Extracting from shakespeare.part001.rar

I discovered that there are two versions of unrar:

    $ dpkg -l "*unrar*"
    Architecture       Description
    un  unrar                       <none>             <none>             (no description available)
    ii  unrar-free                  1:0.0.1+cvs2014070 amd64              Unarchiver for .rar files
    un  unrar-nonfree               <none>             <none>             (no description available)

You probably have the nonfree package. I have no idea about what's the difference between them.

Looks like the original "unrar" has some licensing restrictions (for compression purposes, not decompression). The "unrar-free" version was created as pure FOSS in response, but the performance isn't quite up to par. If there are any compatibility issues, it's likely the latter version that's having them. No idea what "unrar-nonfree" is, I'm guessing it's just another name for the first "unrar".

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2012979

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