So I decided today I was going to make a DVD backup of my music collection. I also decided I was going to use rar to do this.

After about an hour of googling, I had come up with

$ rar a -r -v2100m -vn -m0 -tk -ri15 ~/music-2007-05-26 music

That seemed to work perfectly. The a is for add, r is for recursive, v2100m says split into 2100mb files, vn simply says to call the file .rar, .r00, .r01 rather than file.part1.rar, file.part2.rar, m0 says not to use compression, tk maintains the date on the file, ri15 says to run as the highest priority on the system.

I got halfway done and decided to check a rar. So I ran rar e music-2007-05-25.rar and found that the files were there, but none of the directories had been copied. So I stopped the process and tried just about every switch I could find. Another hour of googling - and I find out that rar e does that, rar x maintains the directories.

I really hate linux some days. What a waste of time that was.