Here’s a guide on how to rar files in Mac OS X. This was done in OS X 10.4.x (Tiger).

1. Download the rar application from http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm, choose the one for Mac OS X.

2. Decompress the file you downloaded and there will be a folder titled rar.

3. Inside that folder is a file also titled rar.

4. Now we need to show hidden files in you Mac. Launch the Terminal application and then enter two commands

$ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

$ killall Finder

Those two commands will show the hidden files

5. Now that the hidden files are shown, look for the bin folder in you Mac, it contains bash, cat, chmod, etc.

6. Now back to the rar folder, look for the rar file and drag it into the bin folder. There will be a prompt that will tell you that it can’t be moved just click on authenticate and enter your pasword.

7. Hide the hidden files by executing these on Terminal

$ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE

$ killall Finder

8. Ok so let’s say that you have a folder of pictures on your Desktop that you want to rar and let’s say that the folder on your Desktop that contains the pics is titled Pics_Vacation. Launch once again the Terminal application and then

$ cd Desktop/Pics_Vacation

Now you are inside the Pics_Vacation folder containing the files that you want to rar.

9. To rar the files you execute this in Terminal

$ rar a TheFilenameoftheRarfile

so for example

$ rar a pics

After it’s done, there will be a file titled pics.rar inside containing all the pics of the Pics_Vacation folder

10. Now let’s say that you want to have different parts of your archive like pics.part01.rar, pics.part02.rar, etc., you need to execute the following command in Terminal

$ rar a -v[size] TheFilenameoftheRarfile

where size is in KB

so for example inside the Pics_Vacation folder, all of the files when archived is 100MB in size but then you want to make it into two parts with 50MB each.

$ rar a -v50000 pics

50000 is 50,000KB which is equal to 50MB

after it’s done you will have

pics.part01.rar
pics.part02.rar

inside the folder