By default, Mac OS X features a built-in Archive utility app, but it lacks few capabilities. It only supports extracting from few formats such as .zip and .gz and other few formats. So there are some other third party RAR apps with added functionalities such as RAR Expander, The Unarchiver and UnRarX. Out of all these three The Unarchiver is the best one.
Unarchiver is the open source application which works consistently with Mac OS X, as how the Mac’s in-built Archive utility works.
How to extract RAR files on Mac
- First download The Unarchiver on your Mac running on OS X 10.3.9 or higher.
- After downloading, drag it to the applications folder and launch it, you will find the preferences window.
- Here choose the archives format which you want to open.
- You can also set the default directory for output under extraction tab. If you don’t do this it will ask every time to select the default directory.
When Unarchiver is working on some file to extract it, it will wait for the first one to complete before starting the second one. This allows the users to set the extracting tasks in queue quickly without slowing down the system.
