topic Re: Unable to unpack or read rar file in Data Engineering

Unable to unpack or read rar file

TechExplorer — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 13:08:28 GMT

Hi everyone,

I'm encountering an issue with the following code when trying to unpack or read a RAR file in Databricks:

with rarfile.RarFile(s3_path) as rf: for file_info in rf.infolist(): with rf.open(file_info) as file: file_content = io.BytesIO(file.read()) df = pd.read_csv(file_content, nrows=10) display(df)

The error message I receive is: "cannot find working tool".

Has anyone successfully managed to unpack or read a RAR file using rarfile.RarFile in Databricks? Any insights or alternative approaches would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

Re: Unable to unpack or read rar file

Walter_C — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 14:06:46 GMT

The direct use of rarfile.RarFile in Databricks often fails with errors such as "cannot find working tool" because the rarfile Python library requires an underlying system utility (unrar or unar) to be available on the host machine. In typical Databricks environments, especially on shared or managed clusters, these system utilities are not pre-installed, which is the root cause of your error.

Install unrar on your cluster (only possible on single-user/dedicated clusters): %sh apt-get update && apt-get install -y unrar
Once installed, confirm the unrar command is available: %sh which unrar
Then rerun your Python code using rarfile.RarFile. The rarfile package should now find the system tool and proceed to extract files

Re: Unable to unpack or read rar file

TechExplorer — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 12:26:33 GMT

Thank you! this solved my problem 😁

Re: Unable to unpack or read rar file

Upendra_Dwivedi — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 16:26:16 GMT

Hi @Walter_C,

I am also using this unrar utility but the problem it is a proprietary software and i am working for a client and this license could cause issues. What is the alternative to unrar so that we eliminate the risk of any legal compliance.