Deleting select files/folders from a RAR without extraction (WinRAR)

I've a bit of a problem here... for the past year I've been attaching different kinds of data to a single .RAR file. This left me with a 245GB .RAR, which I understand, shouldn't have created in the first place. But I did, sadly.

Now, to my knowledge WinRAR doesn't seem to have an option to delete certain files/folders without the need of extraction. I don't have much space left in my HDD, so extraction really isn't an option here.

Is there a command line prompt to help me with this? Thanks in advance, this seems like a nice forum :).

PS: I'm terrible with cmd stuff, so in the case there's a solution like that, please bare with me.

Oh man. The only thing I can think of is to extract 1 file at a time. So, extract, delete, extract, delete, extract, delete, etc.

Good idea, but the problem is if I extract a file from the .RAR, I wind up just having the same file both extracted and compressed. I don't know if I'm expressing correctly: When I extract I don't take the file off the .RAR, it just "copies" it outside.

If there IS a way to extract even a single file (say, as in cut>paste), please let me know. Also, I did specify WinRAR in the thread's title, but that doesn't mean I'm not open to other software if it does the job (i.e. WinZIP, Universal Extractor, etc.).

PS: Sorry for the late reply, internet went down for quite some time. It's been really buggy the last few days.

0Ebony0 said:

Good idea, but the problem is if I extract a file from the .RAR, I wind up just having the same file both extracted and compressed. I don't know if I'm expressing correctly: When I extract I don't take the file off the .RAR, it just "copies" it outside.

If there IS a way to extract even a single file (say, as in cut>paste), please let me know. Also, I did specify WinRAR in the thread's title, but that doesn't mean I'm not open to other software if it does the job (i.e. WinZIP, Universal Extractor, etc.).

PS: Sorry for the late reply, internet went down for quite some time. It's been really buggy the last few days.

Can you just extract the files you want to keep and then delete the archive?

The way WinRAR works, there is no way of deleting files without a complete repack. Within WinRAR there is an option to delete files, but what it really does is to create a NEW .rar file with every other file except the ones you delete. Direct consequence of this is that you need to have that free space for the temporary file, roughly equal to the size of the original .rar file minus the compressed size of the deleted files. Less space than full extraction and recompression by hand, but still a lot.

TwoCables said:

Can you just extract the files you want to keep and then delete the archive?

Alejandro85 said:

The way WinRAR works, there is no way of deleting files without a complete repack. Within WinRAR there is an option to delete files, but what it really does is to create a NEW .rar file with every other file except the ones you delete. Direct consequence of this is that you need to have that free space for the temporary file, roughly equal to the size of the original .rar file minus the compressed size of the deleted files. Less space than full extraction and recompression by hand, but still a lot.

I've only 73GB of free space in my HDD (working on it). I'll consider that option later on, but as of now I'd really like to delete them the way I asked.

I've found some kind of way to deal with this, as I said before, through a command line prompt. I'm not sure if it's allowed to post this (if it's not I'll edit it out ASAP), but this is where I got the info: Xona Games - WinRAR Tip #3: Delete Multiple Files out of Multiple RAR Files

I've tried it that way, but it's no use. I need some kind of instruction with it.