MacMost Now 930: The Unarchiver

The Unarchiver is a free utility that will help you if you need to decompress files of different archive types that are not supported by Mac's built-in Archive Utility. You can decompress old SIT archives and odd download archives like RAR.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's look at the Unarchiver.
It is pretty easy to compress files and to decompress them in Mac OS 10. Refer to MacMost episodes 167 and 517.
But what happens if you get a file that isn't a standard format like .zip or something and you need to decompress it. Well, there is a pretty standard utility that Mac users have been going to for years. It is called The Unarchiver. It is available in the Mac App Store for free.
So you find it pretty easily just by searching for it in the Mac App Store and then you can download it and add it to your apps.
Once you have it installed you can launch it pretty easily and the first time you launch it, it is going to give you this big list of archived formats. You select which ones you want. It will recognize then that these file formats will be opened by Unarchiver on your Mac.
You can see that the list is pretty large, much larger than would be opened by the regular Archiver utility. That's why you really want this here in case you want these files. For instance, RAR Archives are something that you may find from time to time on the internet and it is very difficult to open them. But you can do that with this.
There are all sorts of other formats here. For me, a big one is Stuffit. Stuffit was very popular in the nineties for Mac users so I've got a lot of stuff archived in .sit files and being able to open them up using the utility here and not having to get the most recent version of Stuffit on all my Macs is very useful.
So having all these file types and then you can have extraction preferences and even advanced preferences in here so you can set that all up.
I've got some files right here. An HQX compressed file and a RAR file. You can see how to go about opening them. Just run Unarchiver and you can select one of the unarchived options. Let's just do the Command O standard open. On the desktop I will select one of these files, Unarchive, and you can see here it opened this up which is an archive which contains a font.
Likewise the RAR file here I can open that up as well. You can see there it put the pdf file that came out of that.
If you are looking for something more powerful, for only four bucks you can get, from the same developer, The Archive Browser, which not only allows you to extract them but be able to look inside of these archived files and find out what it is in there and preview the contents.
So very useful especially if you've ever dealt with a file that you couldn't decompress using the standard archive utility built into your Mac or you have old archives, like I do, in different formats. This is a great way to be able to get access to them without having to buy some software.
Hope you found this useful. Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.

MacMost Now 930: The Unarchiver

Comments: One Response to “MacMost Now 930: The Unarchiver”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information