Force Unrar Help Menu Language

Command-line utilities like unrar rely on environment variables to determine which language to use for displaying help text, messages, and command output. By temporarily modifying the system's locale variables (LC_ALL, LC_MESSAGES, or LANG) directly within your shell prompt, you can force the unrar help menu to output in a specific language without permanently altering your system-wide configuration.

Using Environment Variables in Linux and macOS

The most direct method to override the language for a single command execution is to prepend the desired locale code to the unrar command.

To force English output:

LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 unrar -?

To force German output:

LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8 unrar -?

To force Russian output:

LC_ALL=ru_RU.UTF-8 unrar -?

Alternatively, you can target the message display category specifically by using LC_MESSAGES:

LC_MESSAGES=es_ES.UTF-8 unrar -?

Verifying Installed Locales

For this override to work, the target language locale must be generated and supported on your system. If the specified locale is not installed, the terminal will fall back to the default system language or the standard C/POSIX locale.

View all available locales on your machine with:

locale -a

If your desired language is not listed, generate it on Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions by running:

sudo locale-gen <locale_name>
sudo update-locale

(Replace <locale_name> with the appropriate code, such as fr_FR.UTF-8.)

Windows Command Prompt and PowerShell

On Windows systems, command localization behaves differently depending on the version of UnRAR installed:

  1. Localized Binaries: RARLab frequently distributes separate language-specific installers and portable builds for Windows. If your version does not contain multi-language message catalogs, download the dedicated localized executable from the official source.
  2. Code Page Modification: If using a multi-language console build, set the console's active code page before invoking the help command: 
    chcp 65001
unrar.exe -?
    (65001 switches the console to UTF-8 to correctly render non-ASCII characters).