[PLUG] [Fwd: Newsgroup postings question - rar and par and how to easily deal with them in Pan]

[Michael Leone <turgon@mike-leone.com>]

OK, I'm using Pan 0.14.2.91 (on a Debian Unstable system). 

Some things get posted to binary groups that I frequent (and no, it's
not pr0n :-) as multi-part rar archives, and others with associated
"par" files. I know the rar are compressed archives of a sort, and the
"par"s are parity files, so you can reconstruct a complete posting, even
if all parts don't show up.

I'm also apparently an idiot, because i can't seem to get this to work.
:-)

So I downloaded 63 rar files - file01.rar thru file63.rar. So how do I
"unrar" them properly? I thought it would be something like cat'ting the
parts back into 1 big file and "cat *.rar >bigfile.rar" and then "unrar
-x bigfile.rar", but that doesn't work; it failed on all 63 files. :-)

I thought maybe just telling unrar to do "unrar -x file*.rar", but that
doesn't work either. (It seems to want a single archive file to work
from, but I could be wrong about that). So what simple thing am I
missing, to extract out the stuff I want from this archive?

Next, if anybody knows how to tell Pan to do the extracting and decoding
for me (like it decodes yenc encoded files), I would really appreciate
it. I haven't found anything to suggest that it can, however.

Nor have I found anything about how to use those "par" files with Pan.
I'd prefer Pan to handle all of it, if it could. If not, a pointer to a
HOWTO or tutorial would be helpful. 

Thanks


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