How to unrar nested RAR files

archiverar

I have a recursive directory structure which contains a lot of RAR files. I have been using this unrar command to extract all contained files into the current working directory:

unrar e -r -o- *.rar

This is fine. How ever, some RAR files contain other RAR files, which are extracted by the above command. The problem is that the contents of these extracted RAR files do not get extracted, as the extracted RAR's are not part of the initial search.

How to go about this? I do not want to delete the first part of RAR files and do a new search. I'm not very fluent in Bash (or #!/bin/sh -xu which is the shebang of the script) but I'm thinking I want to save the file names of the first search and exclude them in the second command. (Max depth is RAR in RAR.) If there is not any more elegant solution?

Thank you in advance, Viktor.

Edit:

Trying the solution proposed by @icarus:

mkdir unrar
cd unrar
unrar e -r -o- ../*.rar
set -- *.rar
[ -e "$1" ] && unrar e -r -o- *.rar

Best Answer

Use the shell (or find) to find the rar archives. Unpack the first set in a new directory, then unpack any that are in that directory.

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s nullglob globstar
mkdir unrar
cd unrar
for i in ../**/*.rar ; do unrar e -o- "$i" ; done
for i in **/*.rar ; do unrar e -o- "$i" ; done

Related Solutions

Find – Recursively Search All Archive Files for Filename Patterns

(Adapted from How do I recursively grep through compressed archives?)

Install AVFS, a filesystem that provides transparent access inside archives. First run this command once to set up a view of your machine's filesystem in which you can access archives as if they were directories:

mountavfs

After this, if /path/to/archive.zip is a recognized archive, then ~/.avfs/path/to/archive.zip# is a directory that appears to contain the contents of the archive.

find ~/.avfs"$PWD" \( -name '*.7z' -o -name '*.zip' -o -name '*.tar.gz' -o -name '*.tgz' \) \
     -exec sh -c '
                  find "$0#" -name "*vacation*.jpg"
                 ' {} 'Test::Version' \;

Explanations:

Mount the AVFS filesystem.
Look for archive files in ~/.avfs$PWD, which is the AVFS view of the current directory.
For each archive, execute the specified shell snippet (with $0 = archive name and $1 = pattern to search).
$0# is the directory view of the archive $0.
{\} rather than {} is needed in case the outer find substitutes {} inside -exec ; arguments (some do it, some don't).

Or in zsh ≥4.3:

mountavfs
ls -l ~/.avfs$PWD/**/*.(7z|tgz|tar.gz|zip)(e\''
     reply=($REPLY\#/**/*vacation*.jpg(.N))
'\')

Explanations:

~/.avfs$PWD/**/*.(7z|tgz|tar.gz|zip) matches archives in the AVFS view of the current directory and its subdirectories.
PATTERN(e\''CODE'\') applies CODE to each match of PATTERN. The name of the matched file is in $REPLY. Setting the reply array turns the match into a list of names.
$REPLY\# is the directory view of the archive.
$REPLY\#/**/*vacation*.jpg matches *vacation*.jpg files in the archive.
The N glob qualifier makes the pattern expand to an empty list if there is no match.

Shell Script – Unrar to Folder with Same Name as Archive

I have a script in my personal archive that does exactly this. More precisely, it extracts e.g. Spain.rar to a new directory called Spain, except that if all the files in Spain.rar are already under the same top-level directory, then this top-level directory is kept.

#!/bin/sh

# Extract the archive $1 to a directory $2 with the program $3. If the
# archive contains a single top-level directory, that directory
# becomes $2. Otherwise $2 contains all the files at the root of the
# archive.
extract () (
  set -e
  archive=$1
  case "$archive" in
    -) :;; # read from stdin
    /*) :;; # already an absolute path
    *) archive=$PWD/$archive;; # make absolute path
  esac
  target=$2
  program=$3
  if [ -e "$target" ]; then
    echo >&2 "Target $target already exists, aborting."
    return 3
  fi
  case "$target" in
    /*) parent=${target%/*};;
    */[!/]*) parent=$PWD/${target%/*};;
    *) parent=$PWD;;
  esac
  temp=$(TMPDIR="$parent" mktemp -d)
  (cd "$temp" && $program "$archive")
  root=
  for member in "$temp/"* "$temp/".*; do
    case "$member" in */.|*/..) continue;; esac
    if [ -n "$root" ] || ! [ -d "$member" ]; then
      root=$temp # There are multiple files or there is a non-directory
      break
    fi
    root="$member"
  done
  if [ -z "$root" ]; then
    # Empty archive
    root=$temp
  fi
  mv -v -- "$root" "$target"
  if [ "$root" != "$temp" ]; then
    rmdir "$temp"
  fi
)

# Extract the archive $1.
process () {
  dir=${1%.*}
  case "$1" in
    *.rar|*.RAR) program="unrar x";;
    *.tar|*.tgz|*.tbz2) program="tar -xf";;
    *.tar.gz|*.tar.bz2|*.tar.xz) program="tar -xf"; dir=${dir%.*};;
    *.zip|*.ZIP) program="unzip";;
    *) echo >&2 "$0: $1: unsupported archive type"; exit 4;;
  esac
  if [ -d "$dir" ]; then
    echo >&2 "$0: $dir: directory already exists"
    exit 1
  fi
  extract "$1" "$dir" "$program"
}

for x in "$@"; do
  process "$x"
done

Usage (after installing this script in your $PATH under the name extract and making it executable):

extract Folder/*.rar

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Find – Recursively Search All Archive Files for Filename Patterns

Shell Script – Unrar to Folder with Same Name as Archive

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