How to Unrar Multiple Files

Unrar is a useful utility that allows you to uncompress one or more files & folders. It even allows you to unrar a multipart file into single file. In this article, we will look at how to unrar multiple files and how to keep directory structure even after unrar.

How to Unrar Multiple Files

Here are the different ways to unrar multiple files. Please note, in this article, we will be uncompressing multiple files separately and not combining them. If you want to unrar a multipart rar file then here is how to extract multipart rar file.

1. Extract multiple .rar files

First of all, copy all rar files in a single folder e.g /home/ubuntu. Then open terminal and run the following command. Replace /home/ubuntu/ below with your folder of choice.

$ for z in /home/ubuntu/*.rar
do
  sudo unrar e $z;
done

OR

$ for f in /home/ubuntu/*.rar; do sudo unrar e “$f”; done

You may also create a shell script for the same.

2. Create empty shell script

Open terminal and run the following command to create an empty shell script.

$ sudo vi multirar_extract.sh

3. Add shell script

Add the following shell script to this new file.

#!/bin/bash
for z in $1/*.rar
do
  sudo unrar e $z;
done

Save and close file.

In the above code, we have used $1 instead of folder location. We will be passing folder location containing .rar files as a command line argument. This allows us to use the script for any folder.

4. Make shell script executable

Make the above file executable.

$ sudo chmod +x multirar_extract.sh

5. Run shell script

Run the shell script as shown below.

$ ./multrar_extract.sh /home/ubuntu

Please do not add trailing slash after the command line argument since we have added it in our code.

That’s it. In this article, we have looked at how unrar multiple files in a directory. You can use the for loop mentioned in step or the shell script created afterwards to extract multiple .rar files in a folder.

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