How to open a RAR file on a Mac
macOS has never been able to open RAR files, and the App Store is full of utilities that want a subscription for it. Here is why the format is awkward, what your actual options are, and what to check before you extract anything.
Someone sends you a .rar file. You double-click it and macOS either does nothing or opens it in a text editor as a wall of nonsense. This is not a fault on your machine — the Archive Utility that ships with macOS simply does not handle RAR, and never has.
Why RAR is different
ZIP is an open format. Anyone can write software that reads or writes it, which is why every operating system handles ZIP out of the box.
RAR is proprietary. The compression algorithm belongs to a company, and while reading RAR is freely implementable through a published unpacking library, creating RAR requires a licence. That asymmetry is why you will find plenty of Mac tools that extract RAR and essentially none that create it. If a tool claims to make RAR archives on a Mac, look closely at what it is actually producing.
It persists because it is genuinely good at some things — particularly multi-part archives, where a large file is split across .part1.rar, .part2.rar and so on, and recovery records that can repair a slightly damaged archive. Those features kept it alive in file-sharing and backup circles long after ZIP became the default elsewhere.
Your options, honestly
A dedicated extraction app. The normal answer. Install something that reads RAR, double-click, done. Most are free or a small one-time cost; some have moved to subscriptions for what is a fundamentally simple job, which is worth noticing before you agree to it.
The command line. brew install unar then unar file.rar. The unar tool — part of The Unarchiver project — handles RAR, ZIP, 7z, tar and a long list of legacy formats, and it is genuinely excellent. If you already use Homebrew this is a two-minute solution.
Ask for a ZIP. Underrated. If the sender is a colleague rather than a download, "could you send that as a zip?" costs them ten seconds and avoids the whole problem.
Online converters. Avoid. You are uploading the contents of an archive to a stranger's server to save yourself an install. For anything containing documents, credentials or client work, this is not a reasonable trade.
Multi-part archives: the part that confuses people
If you have received archive.part1.rar, archive.part2.rar and archive.part3.rar, you do not extract each one. They are pieces of a single archive.
Put all parts in the same folder and open the first one. The extractor finds the rest by name. If a part is missing, extraction fails partway through — and unlike a corrupt ZIP, which sometimes yields partial files, a missing RAR part usually means you get nothing usable.
Older archives may use the .r00, .r01 naming instead. Same rule: all in one folder, open the first.
Before you extract anything you did not create
Archives are a classic delivery mechanism, and the risks are not theoretical:
- Path traversal. An archive can contain entries with names like
../../../Library/LaunchAgents/something.plist. A careless extractor writes them exactly where the name says, outside the folder you chose. A careful one refuses. - Symbolic links. An entry can be a symlink pointing somewhere sensitive, with a later entry writing "through" it.
- Compression ratio bombs. A few hundred kilobytes that expand to tens of gigabytes and fill your disk.
- Disk space. Less malicious but more common: a 4GB archive that needs 40GB of free space you do not have, discovered halfway through.
You should also expect a password prompt on some archives, and understand that a password on a RAR encrypts contents — but on older ZIP archives, encryption may be weak enough to be decorative. Do not rely on a ZIP password as real protection for sensitive material.
What Ziploom does
Ziploom is a native archive utility for Apple silicon Macs. It extracts RAR, ZIP and 7Z, including password-protected archives, and creates ZIP and 7Z. It does not create RAR — for the licensing reason above, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.
The safety checks in the previous section are built in rather than optional: it inspects for unsafe paths, symbolic links, suspicious compression ratios, oversized jobs and available disk space before it writes anything. You choose how existing destinations are handled instead of discovering afterwards what was overwritten, follow progress while it works, and reveal the output in Finder when it finishes.
All processing happens on your Mac. There is no account, no analytics, no telemetry and no network feature — nothing about the archive or its contents leaves the machine.