Using Winrar from the Command Line

Winrar is a great tool used for compressing files. It also has a command line tool called “rar.exe” to compress files, in case you want to batch it up. Here’s an example of the most common switches I use.

"C:\Program Files\WinRAR\rar.exe" a -m5 -r -ep1 "C:\temp\Work\Upgrades\2010-02-06\111.rar" "C:\temp\Work\Upgrades\2010-02-06\Post-Upgrade\" 

First path is the location of the rar file to create. The second path is either the location of the file(s) or directory to compress.

options used

  -ep1  Exclude base directory from names
  a     Add files to archive
  -r    Recurse subdirectories (will compress entire directories)
  -m5   Set compression level to maximum

You can even assign a password to it using the -p switch