Can Unrar Extract File Comments in RAR Archives?

The command-line utility unrar can read and display comments attached to individual files within a RAR archive, but it cannot automatically extract them as separate, standalone text files during standard archive extraction. Instead, file-specific comments are stored as archive metadata, which unrar exposes through its verbose listing commands. This guide explains how to view these comments and how to export them to text using standard terminal utilities.

Understanding Archive vs. File Comments

RAR archives support two types of comments:

  1. Archive Comments: Global comments describing the entire archive. These can be displayed using the unrar c archive.rar command.
  2. File Comments: Metadata attached directly to specific files inside the container.

When you run standard extraction commands such as unrar e or unrar x, the utility extracts the file payloads but ignores the individual file comment metadata, leaving it inside the archive structure.

Viewing Individual File Comments

To view comments attached to specific files, you must use the verbose listing mode. Run the following command in your terminal:

unrar v archive.rar

Or for a detailed technical list:

unrar vt archive.rar

In the output, unrar prints the file details (such as size, ratio, date, and attributes). If a file contains an individual comment, it will appear directly below that specific file's entry.

Extracting File Comments to a Text File

Because unrar lacks a dedicated switch to dump only individual file comments directly to disk, the standard approach is redirecting the verbose listing output:

  1. Save the full verbose report:

    unrar v archive.rar > archive_details.txt

    This captures all file metadata, including any comments, into a readable text document.

  2. Isolate specific comments using command-line filters: On Linux or macOS, you can combine unrar v with standard parsing tools like grep, sed, or awk to filter out file names and their corresponding comment blocks depending on how the metadata is structured.

While unrar does not create detached metadata files for individual file comments on extraction, using the verbose command (v) provides full access to view, pipe, and save that information.