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.
Comments
I'm basically against using clouds that you yourself do not own and control, and while this stuff sounds great, another user has pointed out open source options which have already done much of what's being described?
Not really true. I have PeaZip and it creates RAR files. Maybe you can not make passworded or different compression RAR files but three or four programs can make simple RAR files.
Fun fact: WinRAR also the only software that can create RAR archive due to proprietary licensing of the format (although implementing extractors is legally permitted). It's also few months older than Windows 95.