Oh so it's just kinda a part of the rar specification then? How did that work on CDs or floppies, if presumably you'd have had to swap out to insert the next part?

[–] amelore@slrpnk.net 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Yes, it asks for the next part if it's not in the same folder with the same name, doesn't really make a difference what it's stored on. Multipart zip and tar also exist.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

So the first file acts as a sort of index? From the earlier comment I thought it was autodetecting the presence of the numbered files and expanding what it found.

[–] amelore@slrpnk.net 2 points 5 months ago

It's going to have some metadata to that effect yes, like a file index or number of parts or total extracted file size. I don't know the details, I've used them I haven't read the spec. rar is Rarlab's proprietary format so there might not even be a public spec.
They're normally all the same size except for the last part, so it's not that file 1 is just an index.