How to Make Unrar Show ISO 8601 Timestamps

By default, the standard unrar utility displays archive contents using a compact tabular format with localized or truncated two-digit year timestamps. To force unrar to output timestamps in the standardized ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS), you can utilize its built-in technical listing mode or pipe the output through standard command-line tools to reformat the data into a clean table.

Method 1: Use the Technical List Command (lt or vt)

The default listing commands (unrar l and unrar v) use a fixed-width table that abbreviates dates (typically DD-MM-YY or MM-DD-YY). To view full four-digit years and standard date-time representations natively within unrar, append the t modifier:

unrar lt archive.rar

or for the verbose technical list:

unrar vt archive.rar

In technical mode, unrar outputs file entries in a key-value block format rather than a compressed table. Each entry contains a timestamp formatted according to ISO 8601 standards:

Name: document.pdf
Type: File
Size: 1048576
Packed size: 985200
Ratio: 93%
mtime: 2024-03-15 14:30:22
Attributes: -rw-r--r--

Method 2: Filter Technical Output for a Clean List

If you need a concise, tabular view containing only the ISO 8601 timestamp and the filename, parse the technical output using awk:

unrar lt archive.rar | awk -F': ' '
  $1 == "Name"  { name = $2 }
  $1 == "mtime" { print $2, "\t", name }
'

This outputs:

2024-03-15 14:30:22      document.pdf
2024-03-16 09:12:05      image.png

Method 3: Use 7-Zip as an Alternative RAR Reader

Because the RARLAB unrar binary lacks a dedicated command-line flag to alter the column formatting of the standard unrar l table, an alternative approach is using 7z (p7zip). 7-Zip natively lists RAR archive contents using ISO 8601 dates by default:

7z l archive.rar

This produces a standard tabular layout with full timestamps:

   Date      Time    Attr         Size   Compressed  Name
------------------- ----- ------------ ------------  ------------------------
2024-03-15 14:30:22 ....A      1048576       985200  document.pdf
------------------- ----- ------------ ------------  ------------------------