Software Update: WinRAR 5.40

RAR Labs has released version 5.40 of its RAR and WinRAR archiving tools. The popular compression tool is available for a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and OS X. It handles most common formats – including rar, zip, cab, arj, lzh, tar, gz, ace, uue, bz2, jar, iso , 7z and z – has a skinnable interface, and support for Zip64 and multivolume cab files. Since version 5.31, the following changes and improvements have been made:

New

• The new “Name character set” submenu in the “Options” menu allows you to choose the character set for the names of packed files. This choice affects browsing within archives and extracting archives. Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + E to quickly open this menu.
  This can be useful when extracting an archive without Unicode file names, for example if a zip file with Chinese file names in the archive is extracted to Windows with Russian set as the language for non-Unicode programs.
• If recovery RAR volumes (.rev files) are located in the same folder as normal RAR files, the ‘Test Archive’ command will verify the contents of the .rev files after the .rar files have been tested.
  If you want to test only .rev files without testing the .rar volumes first, you can choose the .rev files from the file list of WinRAR and press the “Test” button, or if you are at the command line:
  rar t archivename.part1.rev
• Although the NTFS file system allows files with spaces and periods at the end of their names, many Windows programs are unable to properly process files with these names. If the “Allow Potentially Incompatible Names” option is disabled in the “Extended” tab of the extraction dialog box, WinRAR will remove such spaces and periods from the end of the filename where they occur when extracting.
  This option is disabled by default.
  The command-line version RAR also removes trailing spaces and periods when unpacking unless the -oni switch is passed.
• Previously, the “Synchronize archive contents” update mode (switch -as on the command line) was aborted if some of the folders to be packed could not be read. Now WinRar goes ahead with the action of preserving zipped files corresponding to unreadable folders.
• The Shift+Del delete command in WinRAR can be used to delete directories containing non-standard file names with spaces and periods at the end. The usual delete command to the recycle bin, but also the Shift+Del command in previous WinRAR versions failed to delete such folders.
  Unlike the Del command, Shift+Del deletes files permanently (they are not moved to the trash). No questions are asked for files with read-only and system attributes.
• You can drag folders from the folder pane to other programs or the desktop to copy or extract them. Drag the archive icon in the top item of the folder pane to extract the entire archive.
• The “New Folder” button in the Extraction dialog box suggests a new folder name based on the archive name instead of the nondescript “New Folder”.
• Version information in command line version RAR:
  • If the -iver switch is specified, RAR will display the version number and then terminate. You can simply run “RAR -iver”;
  • The text “x86” or “x64” is displayed with the version information of RAR for Windows for both the -iver switch and the copyright title for other commands.
• If the -p switch is used without the optional parameter , it is also possible to set a password using file redirection or a pipe.
  Example:
  rar -p myarchive.rar myfiles < password.txt
• The command line version RAR treats ‘arcname.partN’ as ‘arcname.partN.rar’ if ‘arcname.partN’ does not exist and ‘arcname.partN.rar’ does exist.
  For example, it is possible to start extracting from archivename.part01.rar with the command:
  rar x archivename.part01
• Improvements in support for 7z archives:
  • The “Compact” status is correctly recognized and reported for 7z archives at Info command in WinRAR;
  • Dictionary size is displayed for LZMA and LZMA2-7z archives at Info command in WinRAR;
  • An unknown packed file size within a compact 7z block is reported as ‘?’ instead of ‘0’ when browsing the archive contents in WinRAR.
• Increased maximum comment length for RAR archives from 64 to 256 kB.
  Since SFX script commands are stored in archive comments, it is possible to use longer body and license texts in SFX archives.
• The font size of the WinRAR viewer is increased correctly in Windows high dpi mode.
• The -scul switch can be used to process list files in big-endian UTF-8 encoding, provided they have a proper byte order mark (BOM). Previously, only little-endian files were supported.
• The minimum version of Windows that is supported as of now is Windows XP SP3. WinRAR will not run in Windows XP without service packs.
• The option “Settings” > “File list” > “Allow all capital names” has been removed. This option was intended to ease the transition from MS-DOS to Windows and is no longer needed.

Bugs corrected:

• The “Pack and Email” command in the 64-bit version of WinRAR 5.31 did not work with the 64-bit version of Microsoft Outlook;
• If WinRAR 5.31 was installed for right-to-left language on Windows system with English or other non-right-to-left language, WinRAR could change Windows Explorer appearance to right-to-left;
• If an archive was stored in a folder without write permissions and if the archive contents were to be extracted via drag-and-drop to a folder w

The following downloads are available:
WinRAR 5.40 (32bit)
WinRAR 5.40 (64 bit)
RAR 5.40 for Linux (32bit)
RAR 5.40 for Linux (64bit)
RAR 5.40 for FreeBSD
RAR 5.40 for OS X
RAR 5.40 for Android