Unrar Extraction Speed Report Switch Guide

This guide examines extraction performance tracking in the command-line utility unrar and addresses the question of how to generate an extraction speed report. It clarifies the command-line options available in the official RARLAB utility, explains why no dedicated speed report switch exists, and provides direct, reliable methods for measuring extraction throughput on both Linux and Windows environments.

The official unrar utility does not have a command-line switch designed to output a detailed report of extraction speed during an archive extraction process. While flags exist for controlling output verbosity—such as -id[c,d,p,q] to suppress copyright notices, percentage displays, or general messages—none of the native extraction switches record or display input/output throughput rates or average transfer speeds.

To evaluate RAR decompression performance or obtain detailed speed metrics, users rely on alternative approaches:

Using the Built-In Benchmark Command

Although extraction commands (x and e) do not measure real-time speed, the utility includes a dedicated benchmark command. Running this command tests the processor's compression and decompression speed without extracting target files to disk:

unrar b

This command executes an internal algorithm test and outputs continuous performance data, including processing speed measured in kilobytes per second (KB/s).

Measuring Extraction Speed on Linux and macOS

To determine the actual speed of an extraction operation on Unix-like platforms, pair unrar with standard system performance tools.

  1. The time Utility: Prefixing the command with time measures the total elapsed duration of the extraction.

    time unrar x archive.rar

    Dividing the total uncompressed archive size by the reported real elapsed time provides the average extraction speed.

  2. Pipe Viewer (pv): If monitoring real-time throughput is required, data can be piped through pv during stream extractions to display instantaneous speed, progress, and elapsed time.

Measuring Extraction Speed on Windows

On Windows, PowerShell provides built-in timing capabilities to measure how long an extraction takes:

Measure-Command { unrar x archive.rar }

By retrieving the resulting milliseconds and dividing the total extracted file volume by that time, users can determine the average extraction rate. For real-time disk read and write speeds during extraction, the Windows Resource Monitor (Performance tab) displays active disk I/O metrics specifically tied to the unrar.exe process.