WinRAR 7.20 brings faster archive handling, new time controls & better UTF-8 compatibility

WinRAR 7.20 has been released for Windows users, arriving three months after its beta debut. The update introduces speed improvements across several common workflows. File deletion is now faster in solid RAR archives, and opening very large archives, such as ZIP files containing millions of entries, is more efficient. Building on this, extraction of TAR and TAR-based archives has been streamlined, benefitting users with slower hard drives or collections with large file counts.

Expanding its feature set, WinRAR 7.20 adds a “Generate archive name by mask” option, accompanied by new -ag and -s command line switches. The -tk switch now takes an optional date parameter in the format YYYYMMDDHHMMSS, or preserves the original archive modification time if left blank. Additionally, a new “Specified time” feature allows manual time assignment within the archiving dialog.

Further enhancements include support for UTF-8 output and byte order mark in the “Generate report” command. For users configuring self-extracting (SFX) archives, a “Cloud files” context menu option has been added, and the SFX module now exposes the archive’s name without path or extension as an environment variable. Alongside these, minor updates improve search result exports, minimum file reference size specification, and path exclusion syntax, while several bugs have been fixed.