Can Unrar Show Estimated Time Remaining?

The standard command-line unrar utility cannot natively display the estimated time remaining during an archive extraction. While it outputs a standard percentage indicator to show progress for individual files and the overall archive, it lacks a built-in time-calculation feature or ETA counter. To view an estimated completion time for large RAR extractions, you must rely on external terminal monitoring tools, alternative archive utilities, or graphical frontends.

Default Progress Reporting in Unrar

When you extract an archive using standard commands like unrar x archive.rar, the program outputs the current file being unpacked along with a percentage counter:

Extracting  large_file.iso                     42%

This percentage updates dynamically in your terminal, showing how much data has been processed relative to the total uncompressed size. However, the command-line flags provided by RARLAB do not include an option to calculate or display the remaining duration.

How to Monitor Time Remaining

If you need an accurate ETA while extracting large RAR archives, consider the following alternatives:

1. Use a Graphical Interface

The desktop version of WinRAR (on Windows) or graphical archive managers on Linux (such as File Roller or Ark) automatically calculate extraction speed and provide a live "Time left" estimate based on the current disk write throughput.

2. Use 7-Zip (7z) in the Terminal

The 7-Zip command-line tool can extract RAR files and provides a slightly more detailed progress display in modern terminal versions. While it primarily relies on percentage progress, certain builds and wrappers can compute transfer speeds more reliably than legacy unrar.

3. Monitor Process I/O with System Tools

On Linux and macOS, you can monitor the write speed and remaining data by using system inspection utilities:

  • iotop: Allows you to view the real-time disk write speed generated by the unrar process.
  • Calculating manually: By checking the total uncompressed size with unrar l archive.rar and dividing the remaining bytes by your current disk write speed from iotop, you can estimate the time remaining.

While unrar remains a fast and dependable CLI tool for extracting RAR files, users requiring an automated time-remaining metric must use a graphical archive manager or external system monitoring tools to track the operation.