-bash: rar: command not found

Question

Level 2

235 points

-bash: rar: command not found

Hi All

I'm trying to run command from the terminal and many of them give:

-bash: rar: command not found

specifically I'm trying mplayer to dump a stream, and rar to decompress a file I was sent.

Any ideas?

TIA

BP

Posted on Oct 5, 2005 11:24 PM

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Answer 1

Camelot

Level 9

58,545 points

Oct 6, 2005 11:28 AM in response to bluepolo

Well, the message explains the problem:

rar: command not found

So the shell can't find rar in order to run it.

The issue is whether rar is installed, but not in your $PATH, or whether it's not installed at all and you need to install it.

Do you expect rar to be installed?

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Answer 2

bluepolo Author

Level 2

235 points

Oct 7, 2005 12:28 AM in response to Camelot

well I downloaded rar, de-compressed, moved into /Applications. Then in terminal I switch to /Applications/rar and then type rar text.txt text.rar or anything involving rar / unrar and get the command not found message.

If I double click rar it launches terminal session and tells me stuff.

So rar is presumably installed, and findable?

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Answer 3

Camelot

Level 9

58,545 points

Oct 7, 2005 11:17 AM in response to bluepolo

So rar is presumably installed, and findable?

Maybe by you, but not by the shell.

Typically, /Applications is used by GUI apps. Command line apps rarely, if ever, live in /Applications, and the shell won't look in there for commands.

To see which directories the shell will look in, open a terminal window and type:

echo $PATH

These are the ONLY directories that the shell will look in when you type a command without a path. You will need to move the rar executable into one of these directories in order to have the shell find it automatically.

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Answer 4

bluepolo Author

Level 2

235 points

Oct 8, 2005 3:08 AM in response to Camelot

ahhhhhh!!

do you know how simple that is? and hard for me to find out? thank you thank you!

I put rar into usr/bin and now works!

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Answer 5

Oct 30, 2005 12:17 AM in response to bluepolo

blue - Glad you worked it out. You might look to a package program like fink to handle all these path issues for you (as well as handle updating the binary as it gets changed/updated)

http://fink.sourceforge.net

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Answer 6

bluepolo Author

Level 2

235 points

Oct 31, 2005 4:19 AM in response to Michael Bradshaw

cool - I'll check it out!

thanks

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