Most here are running the xfce gui - it has thunar-archive-plugin (I run a heavily trimmed down kde with lots of stuff removed ) .
It recommends ark - which is what I always use - it will need the package unrar installed. (Most people will never need rar support).
unrar should have been installed - it is part of the 'non-free' stuff so if you didn't have it in your sources - it might be missing.
You need something like this:
Code:
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ buster main non-free contrib
in /etc/apt/sources.list (note the non-free parameter )
One other reason it could be missing is if someone changed the recommended/suggested settings in apt.
To stop auto installations of cruft on very small systems people use APT::Install-Recommends "0" ; APT::Install-Suggests "0" ;
in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/
There is also a unrar-free - but I'm told it has problems.
So most likely you just need to :
If you get an error - fix your apt settings..
.rar files will hopefully go away some day...
,.,.
tar.gz is a tar archive that is gunzipped - not related to rar.
Today most sane linux people would use tar.xz - a tar archive compressed with xz-utils
