Previously xje4bv has shared with us 5 free tools to automatically extract multiple zip or rar archives. They are Unpacker, RARZombie, ExtractNow, The Scene Release Unpacker and Scene Unpacker (1.0.0.1). We’re not talking about software to manage zip archives such as 7-Zip or Universal Extractor but rather a simple portable tool that is able extract multiple archive files. For example, if you’ve downloaded many different types of files that is compressed into ZIP or RAR, extracting one by one is going to be a tedious task.
Other than the 5 tools that xje4bv shared with us, there are 6 more free tools that can handle extracting multiple compressed files. They are BulkExtractor, AutoUnpack, ParNRar, ZipALot, UnZipThemAll and QuickZip4. I’ve tested all 11 of them and I am not going to go into details because not even one out of the 11 that satisfies my requirement in batch extracting archive files. To me, a tool to extract multiple zip or rar archives MUST support password because there are a lot of sites that encrypts the archive with password so that people would know where the file originally came from. Or it can be a form of advertisement when another site leeched the download link.
Out of the 11 free batch extracting tools, only a few that can support password. For some, you can set the password in the settings so that it will try to extract with the predefined password and some will prompt you to enter the password when it finds out that the archive is encrypted with a password.
Unfortunately not even ONE can support entering multiple passwords or a password list. A lot of times I just download what I think it’s interesting but never had the time to immediately check the file. So I ended up accumulating a bunch of compressed files with different passwords and I got even lazier to check them out because I knew I had to extract one by one which will take a lot of my time doing just that.
Ah, good news is I found that jDownloader, a very good one-click file hosting downloader tool that is able to handle extracting multiple RAR archive files WITH a password list! I am going to show you how easy it is to extract multiple RAR archives using jDownloader.
1. Make sure your computer have at least Java Runtime Environment v1.5 installed. You can go here to verify the version of Java that is installed on your PC.
2. Download the latest version of jDownloader. If you already have it on your computer, it has an auto update feature to make sure you have the latest version of the program and addons.
3. Extract the downloaded jDownloader and run JDownloader.exe. It should take a few seconds to load and this is normal because it runs on Java.
4. Click Addons in menu bar and go to JD-Unrar > Settings. Go through all the settings there and also enter all the password that you want JD-Unrar to try to extract when it finds a RAR file passworded. Click OK when done.
5. Now again click Addons in the menu bar and go to JD-Unrar > Extract archive(s).
6. Select all the RAR files in a folder (make sure you move all your RAR files that you want to extract in a folder first) and click Open.
7. jDownloader will now extract all your RAR files that you selected and also automatically tries the list of password. If the password is not found, it can prompt you to manually enter the password. It is like brute forcing an encrypted RAR file. Do take note that if you have a long list of password, the extraction time can take very long.
jDownloader is free, portable and is very actively being developed but unfortunately JD-Unrar can only support RAR archive. I know the main coder of jDownloader and will make a request for him to add ZIP support in JD-Unrar. When that happens, it will be the perfect archive batch extracting tool!