I am quite surprised to find that linux has quite poor support for rar files. I have tried both unrar-free as well as the non-free version but both fail spectacularly at decompressing password protected multi-part archives. A few seconds into decompressing, an error message pops up claiming the file is unsupported. rar seems to be a relatively common compression format especially for the windows camp. The linux camp has many alternatives (gz, bz, bz2 ... ) but the issue is when receiving a file from a window's user, it is likely to be in rar or 7z, therefore support for rar is still important.
What makes it even more frustrating is that both versions have different switches for even the most common function.
unrar -e (extract files) -p (print file to stdout) -v (verbosely list archive) unrar-free -x (extract files) -p (supply password) -V (version info)
The flags for unrar-free are similar to those for gzip but the conflict with unrar causes lots of confusion for users. Nevertheless, both do not work properly. I would have to stick to decompressing them on my windows machine