Download WinRAR 6.10 Beta 1

RAR Labs has released the first beta release of version 6.10 of its RAR and WinRAR archiving tools. This popular compression tool is available for a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and macOS. The program handles the most common formats – including rar, zip, cab, arj, lzh, tar, gz, uue, bz2, jar, iso, 7z and z – has a skinnable interface, and support for Zip64 and multivolume cab -files. The following changes and improvements have been made in this release:

New:

• WinRAR can unpack contents of .zst and .zipx archives utilizing Zstandard algorithm.
• Added support of Windows 11 Explorer context menus.
  Beginning from Windows 11, an application can add only a single top level command or submenu to Explorer context menu.
  If “Cascaded context menus” in “Integration settings” dialog is on, this single item is a submenu storing all necessary WinRAR commands.
  If this option is off, only one extraction command for archives and one archiving command for usual files are available. You can select these commands with “Context menu items…” button in “Integration settings” dialog.
• Windows XP is not supported anymore. Minimum required operating system version is Windows Vista.
• “Close” item is added to “When done” list on “Advanced” page of archiving dialog. It closes WinRAR window, when archiving is done.
• “When done” list is added to “Options” page of extraction dialog. It allows to select an action like turning a computer off or closing WinRAR after completing extraction.
• Switch -si can be used when extracting or testing to read archive data from stdin, such as:
  type docs.rar | rar x -si -o+ -pmypwd dummy docs\
  Even though the archive name is ignored with this switch, an arbitrary dummy archive name has to specified in the command line.
  Operations requiring backward seeks are unavailable in this mode. It includes displaying archive comments, testing the recovery record, utilizing the quick open information, processing multivolume archives.
  Prompts requiring user interaction are not allowed. Use -o[+|-|r]-p or -mes switches to suppress such prompts.
• New -ep4 switch excludes the path prefix when archiving or extracting if this path is found in the beginning of archived name. Path is compared with names already prepared to store in archive, without drive letters and leading path separators. For example:
  rar a -ep4texts\books archive c:\texts\books\technical
  removes “text\books” from archived names, so they start from ‘technical’.
• New -mes switch skips encrypted files when extracting or testing.
• New -op switch sets the destination folder for ‘x’ and ‘e’ extraction commands. Unlike command line parameter, this switch also accepts paths without trailing path separator character.
• If ‘p’ command is used to print a file to stdout, informational messages are suppressed automatically to prevent them mixing with file data.
• “Generate archive name by mask” option and switch -ag treat only first two ‘M’ characters after ‘H’ as minutes. Previously any amount of such characters was considered as minutes.
  It makes possible to place the time field before the date, like -agHHMM-DDMMYY. Previous versions considered all ‘M’ in this string as minutes.
• Maximum allowed size of RAR5 recovery record is increased to 1000% of protected data size. Maximum number of RAR5 recovery volumes can be 10 times larger than protected RAR volumes.
  Previous WinRAR versions are not able to use the recovery record to repair broken archives if recovery record size exceeds 99%. Similarly, previous versions cannot use recovery volumes if their number is equal or larger than number of RAR volumes.
• Warning is issued if entered password exceeds the allowed limit of 127 characters and is truncated. Previously such passwords had been truncated silently.
• If archive includes reserved device names, the underscore character is inserted in the beginning of such names when extracting. For example, aux.txt is converted to _aux.txt. It is done to prevent compatibility problems with software unable to process such names.
  You can use “Allow potentially incompatible names” option in “Advanced” part of extraction dialog or command line -oni switch to avoid this conversion.
• WinRAR attempts to reset the file cache before testing an archive. It helps to verify actual data written to disk instead of reading a cached copy.
• Multiple -v switches specifying different sizes for different volumes are now allowed also for ZIP archives:
  WinRAR a -v100k -v200k -v300k arcname.zip
  Previously multiple -v switches were supported only for RAR archives.
• Switches -sl and -sm can be used in WinRAR.exe command line mode when extracting archives in any supported formats, provided that such archive includes unpacked file sizes. Previously these switches could filter files by size only in RAR and ZIP archives.
• Newer folder selection dialog is invoked when pressing “Browse” button in WinRAR “Settings/Paths” page, “Repair” and “Convert” commands, also as in few other similar places. Previously a simpler XP style folder selection dialog was opened.
• When restoring from tray after completing an operation, WinRAR window is positioned under other opened windows, to not interfere with current user activities.
• “650 MB CD” is removed and “2 GB volumes” is added to the list of predefined volume sizes in “Define volume sizes” dialog invoked from WinRAR “Settings/Compression”.
• “Rename” command selects the file name part up to the final dot. Previously it selected the entire name.
• If SFX archive sizes exceeds 4 GB, an error message is issued during compression, immediately after exceeding this threshold. Previously this error was reported only after completing compression.
  Executables of such size cannot be started by Windows.
• Command line -en switch is not supported anymore. It created RAR4 archives without the end of archive record.
  End of archive record permits to gracefully skip external data like digital signatures.

Bug fixed:

• When editing a file inside of .rar or .zip archive, WinRAR created a new SFX archive instead of updating an existing archive if “Create SFX archive” option was set in the default compression profile;
• The total progress could be displayed incorrectly when using -oi, -f, -u switches or appropriate GUI options;
• “Find files” command with “Use all tables” option and command line “it” commands failed to find strings in UTF-16 encoding.

The following downloads are available:
WinRAR 6.10 beta 1 (32bit)
WinRAR 6.10 beta 1 (64bit)
RAR 6.10 beta 1 for Linux (32bit)
RAR 6.10 beta 1 for Linux (64bit)
RAR 6.10 beta 1 for FreeBSD (32bit)
RAR 6.10 beta 1 for FreeBSD (64bit)
RAR 6.10 beta 1 for macOS (64bit)
RAR 6.10 beta 1 for macOS (M1)