Download WinRAR 3.40 beta 1

RARLab has released the first beta of WinRAR 3.40, the popular compression utility. This test version is available for the following platforms: Windows† Pocket PC† Linux† MacOS X† DOS and OS/2and FreeBSD† The program has been extensively tinkered with and the list of innovations is large:

Version 3.40 beta 1

• “Fastest” (-m1) RAR compression method has been modified to provide much higher compression speed and lower ratio. It may be useful for tasks requiring the high speed like regular backups.
• You may increase “Fastest” speed even more selecting 64KB compression dictionary instead of default 4MB.
• WinRAR is able to decompress archives created by Unix ‘compress’ tool (.Z files). Like GZIP and BZIP2 archives, WinRAR opens tar.Z and .taz files in one step, so users do not need to unpack .tar manually.
• WinRAR is able to decompress archives created by 7-Zip (.7z files). “Find” command is not supported for this archive type.
• New “Security” dialog in WinRAR settings:
  • “File types to exclude from extracting” option to prevent extracting of potentially dangerous files like .exe, .scr and .pif;
  • “Propose to select virus scanner” option modifies behavior of “Scan archive for viruses” command. You may turn it off if you wish to skip the virus scanner selection dialog.
• New command line switch -ep3 allows to save and restore full file paths including the drive letter.
• WinRAR shell equivalent of -ep3 switch are options “Store full paths including drive letter” in “Files/File paths” page of archiving dialog and “Extract absolute paths” in “Advanced/File paths” page of extracting dialog.
• You may select and compress disks directly in “My Computer” view in WinRAR shell. Just choose “My Computer” in WinRAR address bar, select disks to compress and press “Add”. If you selected more than one item, WinRAR will automatically set “Store full paths including drive letter” archiving mode.
• If you selected several disks in Windows Explorer “My Computer” view and started archiving from context menu, WinRAR will automatically set “Store full paths including drive letter” mode when compressing them.
• New command line switch -oc to restore NTFS “Compressed” attribute when extracting files. RAR always saves “Compressed” attribute when creating an archive, but does not restore it unless -oc switch has been specified.
• WinRAR shell equivalent or -oc switch is “Set attribute Compressed” option in “Advanced” part of extracting dialog.
• Starting from this version RAR volumes contain the volume number field.
• If archive was created by WinRAR 3.40 or newer, you may view the volume number in the top line of “Info” dialog and in the address bar.
• In the command line mode the volume number is displayed by ‘L’ and ‘V’ commands in the line with the total volume information.
• This feature may be useful if original volume names are lost and you need to rename volumes to correct names.
• Commands ‘L’ and ‘V’ display NTFS “Compressed” attribute in archive listing.
• Switch -ag may include an optional text enclosed in ‘” rel=”external”>’ and ” characters. This text is inserted into archive name. For example: -agHH” rel=”external”>hoursMM” rel=”external “>minutes
• Same feature is supported in “Generate archive name by mask” field of WinRAR archiving dialog.
• If switch -ac is specified, RAR will not reset “Archive” attribute of those files, which size or modification time was changed after starting the archiving operation.
• So files modified after placing them to archive and before clearing “Archive” attribute, will be included to next incremental backup. The same is true for WinRAR “Clear attribute “Archive” after compressing” GUI option.
• If you use “Add to favorites” command inside of archive subfolder, WinRAR will save the subfolder and restore it when accessing to this favorite item. Previous versions were able to restore only the root archive folder.
• When editing archived files, WinRAR proposes to update them immediately after detecting that file was changed. Previous versions waited until an external editor terminates before updating a changed file.
• If you drop an archive to WinRAR address bar or toolbar, WinRAR will display its contents even if other archive is opened now. Previous versions proposed to add a dropped archive to browsing one.
• You may still drop an archive to WinRAR file list if you need to add it to browsing archive.
• Corrected processing of corrupt LZH archives to exclude a possible crash when reading corrupt LZH file headers.