What's the easiest way to unrar a file?

I just realized I can't unrar .rar files on my Ubuntu machine!

What's the easiest way to accomplish this fundamental task? If possible I'd love something like 7Zip that I can just right Click, and extract and have the program worry about how to do it regardless if it's a .zip, a .rar or a .foo compressed file.


Ubuntu by default uses File Roller, which supports the following formats:

7-Zip Compressed File (.7z)
WinAce Compressed File (.ace)
ALZip Compressed File (.alz)
AIX Small Indexed Archive (.ar)
ARJ Compressed Archive (.arj)
Cabinet File (.cab)
UNIX CPIO Archive (.cpio)
Debian Linux Package (.deb) read-only
ISO-9660 CD Disc Image (.iso) read-only
Java Archive (.jar)
Java Enterprise archive (.ear)
Java Web Archive (.war)
LHA Archive (.lzh, .lha)
WinRAR Compressed Archive (.rar)
RAR Archived Comic Book (.cbr)
RPM Linux Package (.rpm) read-only
Stuffit Archives (.bin, .sit)
Tar Archives:
    uncompressed (.tar)
    compressed with:
        gzip (.tar.gz , .tgz)
        bzip (.tar.bz , .tbz)
        bzip2 (.tar.bz2 , .tbz2)
        compress (.tar.Z , .taz)
        lzip (.tar.lz , .tlz)
        lzop (.tar.lzo , .tzo)
        7zip (.tar.7z)
        xz (.tar.xz)
ZIP Archive (.zip)
ZIP Archived Comic Book (.cbz)
ZOO Compressed Archive File (.zoo)
Single files compressed with gzip, bzip, bzip2, compress, lzip, lzop, rzip, xz.

Keep in mind, that this is just graphical front-end, so you still need to install unrar for .rar support;

The unrar package is hosted on the Multiverse repository, so first you'll need to enable the Multiverse repository in Software & Updates;

Then you can install the package either by using Software Centre or by opening Terminal and running sudo apt-get install unrar.


First, run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unrar

You could read man unrar.

From terminal you can use next command:

unrar e -r /home/work/software/myfile.rar

Or, the following command if you want to preserve the directory structure too:

unrar x -r /home/work/software/myfile.rar

Install unrar from the Software Center or by running the command

sudo apt install unrar

If you like then you can also use p7zip-full package. You can install it as:

sudo apt-get install p7zip-full p7zip-rar

The main purpose of this package is to provide 7z and 7za file archivers with high compression ratio.


$ sudo apt-get install unrar
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package unrar is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'unrar' has no installation candidate

I tried the above command on Ubuntu 16.04, but it didn't work.

The following command worked fine for me:

sudo apt-get install unrar-free