I am embarrassed to have to ask for help with this. My issue is that I'm tech savvy enough to have built my server, put unRAID on it, and gotten pretty much everything doing what I want. Unfortunately I'm not quite enough of a wizard to get over what seems like a stupidly low hurdle that's in my way. 

 

I'm running a Plex server, and I get my media files from a private torrent site. Every so often I can't find a version of a file I want that isn't part of a RAR archive. Once those are downloaded, they need to be combined. I can't seem to get a simple solution to this. Here's what I've tried so far:

 

- I can copy them off the server onto my laptop, run them through 7-Zip, and then copy them back. This will work but is really slow because moving the files across the network is pokey. 

 

- Somewhere in the forums I read about someone else with the same issue. They said they solved their problem with Krusader. I have Krusader, and it seems like in the file menu there are indeed options for packing/unpacking or splitting/combining files. Can't get these to work. 

 

- I've got the Nerd Pack. I know there's a RAR utility in there, but I don't understand how to use it. I assume it's going to have to be via the command line. I'd have to do this through a terminal window I guess? I am crap at command line stuff, but could probably make this work if I had an example to work off of. Can't find instructions walking me through this. 

 

- In following another forum suggestion I saw that Filebot might be an answer. I actually got this installed on the server, got it up and running, and had it work successfully several times. I was actually using the GUI rather than the automated In/Out folders. But something changed and I can't get it working again. 

 

- My next overly complicated solution to this problem was to install a Windows 10 VM, onto which I planned to install 7-Zip or the like, and I figured I could use that to combine things. I got the VM installed but I'm running into some weird login credential issue that won't let me access any of the shares on the array. That has led me to a whole new host of forum posts trying to fix that, and suddenly I'm down a new rabbit hole. 

 

So that's where I'm at. None of this is really mission critical, but it's pissing me off that I can't figure this out. I thought I'd finally try asking for help. I need to figure out which of these is the best choice to focus on and then I can dump more energy into figuring it out. Anyone have any brilliant thoughts?

HA! I figured something out. I was a little apprehensive about having to use the command line. I was poking around in Krusader and saw that I could browse to a given folder and then open a terminal window at that spot, which I did. Now in the same directory as the RAR file I didn't need to mess with a lengthy absolute or relative reference to point to the file. So I just tried 'unrar e name.of.torrent.rar' and voila, it worked. 

 

Not quite as easy as a GUI because the torrent names are a pain to type, but doable. 

If you type the first few letters of a file name you can press the TAB key to complete it. If what you have typed is enough to identify the file uniquely it will automatically complete the name. If it is insufficient it will complete as much of the name as is common to all matches and then you can press TAB again to list the possible names that match.

On 5/9/2018 at 2:25 PM, GabeB said:

HA! I figured something out. I was a little apprehensive about having to use the command line. I was poking around in Krusader and saw that I could browse to a given folder and then open a terminal window at that spot, which I did. Now in the same directory as the RAR file I didn't need to mess with a lengthy absolute or relative reference to point to the file. So I just tried 'unrar e name.of.torrent.rar' and voila, it worked. 

 

Not quite as easy as a GUI because the torrent names are a pain to type, but doable. 

I'd been having exactly the same issues for a while and this worked perfectly! Though I did learn the hard way that "unrar x" respects the rar file folder structure, while "unrar e" will just dump everything in your current directory.