Script to batch decompress .rars?

[Marquis_de_Carabas]

I have a ton of .rar files that I wish to decompress, but doing them one by one takes far too long. unrar "*.rar* works fine, but the problem is that although some of the archives contain only one file, many contain several and I would like these to be expanded to their own directory.

I'm thinking that a shell script using the output of unrar v to work out how many files are in the archive and then proceeding accordingly would work well, but I'm not entirely sure how to achieve that. I'm a bit of a newbie at this scripting thang so any advice would be appreciated.

[lotheac]

I'm not the best scripter available but I wrote something real quickly and it seems to work.

#!/bin/bash

for file in $(ls *rar)
   do if (( `unrar l $file | tail -n 2 | grep -v ^$ | awk '{print $1}'` != 1 ))
        then mkdir $file-files
        cd $file-files
        unrar e ../$file
        cd ..
   else 
        unrar e $file
   fi
done

This will take the two last lines from the output of unrar l (last line is blank, so discard it), pass it through awk to output only the first column. If it's not 1, it'll create a directory (whose name is the filename and a '-files' appendix), cd into it and unrar the files there. If there's only one file in the archive, it'll just extract it in the current directory.

Hope it works.

[Marquis_de_Carabas]

Thank you! It works pretty well. It can't handle spaces in filenames though. I tried putting quotes around every instance of $file, but that hasn't helped.

I have a script which turns all the spaces into underscores, so it's not really a problem, but I'm curious as to how that could be recitified.

The other thing is that some of the .rar files have a weird empty file in them. Here's an example output of unrar l

UNRAR 3.40 freeware      Copyright (c) 1993-2004 Alexander Roshal

Archive Aleister_Crowley_-_The_Heart_of_the_Master_(TXT).rar

 Name             Size   Packed Ratio  Date   Time     Attr      CRC   Meth Ver
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Crowley, Aleister - The Heart of the Master.txt    42484    14015  32% 10-05-03  12:08  .....A.   7CA5606D m5b 2.9
 Aleister Crowley - The Heart of the Master (TXT)        0        0   0% 06-04-0 6 01:10  .D.....   00000000 m0  2.0
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    2            42484    14015  32%

The script ends up creating a folder and putting the single text file in there. Which isn't a fault of the script of course; I'm not sure there's any way to work around these bizarre rars.

Thanks again, you've saved me a lot of time

[lotheac]

I suppose for a workaround to the space thing you'd have to use sed or something on the variable to escape whitespaces with a backslash, ie. replace them with a '\ '. That, or there might be an easier solution I'm not seeing.

I'm not sure (should probably read the manpage), but it could be that the 0-byte 'file' is in fact a directory, in which case you could just use unrar x instead of mkdir and cd (unrar x extracts with path).

[Marquis_de_Carabas]

it could be that the 0-byte 'file' is in fact a directory

Yep, you're right. I really should have checked that possibility myself. It just didn't occur to me that anybody would want to create a .rar consisting of a directory containing one individual text file. Why would anyone do that?

Unfortunately most of the rars with multiple files in aren't in directories. The creator obviously got confused and thought that individual files needed to be in a directory while multiple files were fine just compressed together...

That, or there might be an easier solution I'm not seeing.

When using unrar in the shell you can either escape the spaces or surround the filename with quotes.

 unrar e "Name of the file.rar"

works just as well as

unrar e Name\ of\ the\ file.rar

which is why I thought changing $file to "$file" would work, but for some reason it wasn't to be. I'm sure it's a simple matter of syntax or something. I'll figure it out eventually

[lotheac]

Well actually it just occurred to me it's not about escaping whitespaces or quoting the filename, it's because 'for file in $(ls *rar)' runs the loop for every whitespace-delimited word one by one -- ie. "Name of the file.rar" triggers the loop four times, for "Name", "of", "the" and "file.rar". There's a somewhat simple workaround, and that's using 'ls -b *rar'. This would make ls output "Name\ of\ the\ file.rar" instead of "Name of the file.rar" and the script should work correctly.

[jazzmuzik]

for file in $(ls *rar)

This works for me:

for file in *rar

[lotheac]

Or that. Let's try again... I'm still learning.

#!/bin/bash

for file in *rar
   do if (( `unrar l $file | tail -n 2 | grep -v ^$ | awk '{print $1}'` != 1 ))
        then unrar e $file ${file%\.rar}/
   else 
        unrar e $file
   fi
done

This will create directories with the filename minus the extension, which in my opinion is nicer than what I had previously... but it required some googling

Also I found out that unrar will accept another directory to extract to only if it has a forward slash, which shortens the script slightly.

[Jose Catre-Vandis]

Thanks the use of the double quotes to allow for spaces in the compressed file names is a useful tip. I had a batch of files to unrar, all password protected. Used the following:

unrar e -y "*.rar"

(e -> extracts to current directory, -y -> suppresses confirmations etc)

Typed the password once and the whole lot got done. I know this doesn't strictly fit in with the need above, but the thread helped me, and had to share success!

[rascalli]

how does this work if I have .r00 and so on files ?

Does it extract them also ?

I tried this script.
but it only works in the folder that has the rar's

my set-up is :

/storage -->> /storage/movies -->> /storage/movies/movie1/ -->> /storage/movies/movie1/CD1
/storage -->> /storage/movies -->> /storage/movies/movie1/-- >>storage/movies/movie1/CD2
/storage -->> /storage/movies -->> /storage/movies/movie1/ -->>/storage/movies/movie2/

Would it be possible to make a script for this ?

or to avoid doing this in the future an script for glftpd that comes in after upload is completed