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Fix "Password required" Error When Using Unrar in Ubuntu

If you've tried to use the built-in "Extract Here" functionality in Ubuntu's File Roller to extract either a single or a multi-part zip or rar file and ended up with a "Password required" error, then you might just assume the files are password protected when in fact they are not.

It turns out that this error message pops up for one of two other reasons:

  • The files are named incorrectly or a file is missing. Remember that Linux is case-sensitive and all files in the set should be named similarly.
  • One of the files is damaged and might need to be repaired using GPar2, if you have the matching PAR files.

Here's the irritating error message.

If you've also got the corresponding PAR recovery set files, what you'll want to do is install GPar2 using the Add/Remove Applications, or by just typing the following command into a terminal prompt:

sudo apt-get install gpar2

Then you can just open up any one of the .par2 files and click the Repair button, which will take a fairly long time to complete, but should allow you to extract without errors.

More information on PAR or Parchive files can be found at Wikipedia, of course:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive

The Geek is the founder of How-To Geek and a geek enthusiast. When he's not coming up with great how-to articles, he's probably writing at his personal blog. This article was written on 05/9/07 and tagged with: Ubuntu

Comments (3)

  1. caner

    thank you bro. this was a really irritating problem .

  2. Revolution

    Thank you for this

  3. Jeremy Harmon

    I've also noticed that if you use the non-free unrar (you can get it at www.rarlabs.com) that it'll work fine on files that give you the password prompt.


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