yEnc, .rar .par? Huh?

dstranathandstranathan
Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
Been a long time since I hung out in the newsgroups sites, I am showing my age!



What are .par files? How do I open them in OS X?



What are .rar files? How do I open thne in OS X?



What is yEnc? Can someone briefly explain it and compare it to other encodings?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    keshkesh Posts: 621member
    The other two I'm not familiar with, but .rar is a compression scheme that seems to be very efficient. Much better than Zip, and almost certainly generates smaller files than SitX.



    However, it's only common on Windows, and even then Zip is still king.
  • Reply 2 of 7
    razzfazzrazzfazz Posts: 728member
    [quote]Originally posted by Kesh:

    <strong>The other two I'm not familiar with, but .rar is a compression scheme that seems to be very efficient. Much better than Zip, and almost certainly generates smaller files than SitX.



    However, it's only common on Windows, and even then Zip is still king.</strong><hr></blockquote>



    Fink has the "unrar" package, which will at least let you extract RARs on OS X.



    Bye,

    RazzFazz
  • Reply 3 of 7
    pyr3pyr3 Posts: 946member
    If you say zip is still king, then you obviously don't go on to newsgroups and IRC. Anything that is distro'd at all is in .rar or at least .zip files that are then .rar'd. Just like how most linux stuff is distro'd in '.tar' '.tar.gz' of '.tgz'. (the last two are the same thing)
  • Reply 4 of 7
    pyr3pyr3 Posts: 946member
    <a href="http://www.slyck.com/newsgroups7.html"; target="_blank">Here</a> is a link about .par files.
  • Reply 5 of 7
    pyr3pyr3 Posts: 946member
    <a href="http://www.yenc.org/whatis.htm"; target="_blank">Here</a> is a link to yEnc. Seems to me that someone didn't want to use google. Both this and the previous link were of the first 6 links in google searches for '.par file' and 'yenc'.
  • Reply 6 of 7
    a2daja2daj Posts: 30member
    Why use Fink when you can use UnrarX?

    <a href="http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=15272&db=mac"; target="_blank">http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=15272&db=mac</a>;



    If you REALLY want to use a command line tool:

    <a href="http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=15273&db=mac"; target="_blank">http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=15273&db=mac</a>;



    With my rars and pars, I just double click on them and UnrarX handles the rest.



    Both are free. There's a shareware app for rar files, but I can't recall the name.
  • Reply 7 of 7
    der kopfder kopf Posts: 2,275member
    .par is pure magic. How it works, I do not know, but I do know WHAT it does. As binaries in newsgroups are often posted in segments, and many newsservers are less than perfect in capturing all segments, pars were invented to help. Let's say you have, for instance, 10 segments for a post (a small video or an mp3 for example), and you are able to download only 7 because your server mangled the rest.



    If then the poster provided PAR files, and (mostly there is one file with the extension .par, and multiple with .p01, .p02, ...) you manage to grab 3 (the amount you're missing) of the .p01, ... numbered ones, AND the .par one, you'll be able to rebuild ANY three missing segments of the particular post.



    This is, if you have understood, pure magic. Mostly after a large posting (&gt;100 MB), there are days, even weeks of repost requests for specific segments. If the poster provides plenty PAR files, all these people will be able to finish their downloads, and the poster will have to burden the servers A LOT less.
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