The developers of Rarlab yesterday released an update to the cult archiver WinRAR 7.0 and RAR 7.0. The program is available in versions for Linux, macOS, Windows, Android and FreeBSD; The project's source code is also available under a restrictive license.
In terms of compression ratio when using dictionaries up to 4 GB, RAR7 is inferior to LZMA2, but offers faster compression and some features not found in 7-Zip. In particular, this includes recovery information, as well as support for created, modified, and last opened fields.
WinRAR 7.0 and RAR 7.0 added support for dictionaries up to 64 GB in size - this will allow more efficient compression, for example, of virtual machine images. If the dictionary size is more than 4 GB, you can specify any size - previously only powers of two were supported; When unpacking archives with a dictionary larger than 4 GB, you will need WinRAR/RAR 7.0 and a later version. An algorithm for searching for duplicate data has appeared that is disabled by default - it is controlled by the command line switch “-mcl[+|-]”; The “-mcx” switch is also available, which runs a slower algorithm for carefully searching for repetitions. Both options with dictionaries up to 4 GB are available for unpacking RAR 5.0 and later versions. The maximum length of file paths in the archive has increased from 2047 to 65,535 characters.
In version WinRAR 6.1 dated January 2022, developers abandoned support for graphic mode on Windows XP - it is only available on platforms starting with Windows Vista. Last August, with the release of WinRAR 6.23, a vulnerability was closed that allowed remote attackers to run arbitrary code from a specially prepared archive without the user noticing.