unraring en masse in bash

[The Switch Blade]

Basically I have a folder of .rar files that I want to unrar. I have been using the following script:

for name in *.rar; do unrar x $name; done

The script works excellently, except for one thing: all of the files have the same password, and I have to manually type the password every single time. So what I try is

for name in *.rar; do unrar x $name -p<thepassword>; done

But that doesn't work. Help please?

[sisco311]

It works for me. Are you sure that the password is correct? Linux is case sensitive. Does it contain any special characters or spaces? Do you get any error message?

EDIT:
You don't have to separate the -p option from the password by a space.

for name in *.rar; do unrar x $name -ppassword; done

(Assuming that the password is password.)

[J V]

I think sisco means there *should* be a space there...

Also, if your pass includes spaces, quote it.

Also, shoulden't that x be -x?

for name in *.rar; do unrar -xp "password" $name; done

[sisco311]

I think sisco means there *should* be a space there...

I mean, the -p switch should not be separated from its argument by a space.

The correct syntax is:

unrar x file.rar -ppassword

where file.rar is the name of the archive & password is the password.

[J V]

Thats what it says in the manual, but I think its a spelling error, not good bash standard :/

[sisco311]

Thats what it says in the manual, but I think its a spelling error, not good bash standard :/

No, it's not. You can try it:

> file
rar a -phpassword file.rar file
rm file
unrar x -ppassword file.rar

a and x (add/extract) are commands passed to rar and unrar, just like apt-get install or apt-get purge. -ph and -p are switches like grep -A5 or fsck -C0.

It may look awkward, but the syntax is not uncommon.