What's this mean?

[wavemaker]

The utility unrar is not in your PATH. Please install it or contact your administrator.
I down loaded some icons to desktop, when I click on it I get the above message. This is double dutch to me, where do I go from here. Any help appreciated and thanks in advance.

[Fintan]

Re: What's this mean?

I don't know what you mean by:

I down loaded some icons to desktop, when I click on it I get the above message.

But unrar is in the repositories so you can install it with adept / synaptic or

sudo apt-get install unrar

For more reading:
Unarchiver for .rar files (non-free version)
Unrar can extract files from .rar archives. If you want to create .rar
archives, install package rar.

This package is auto-buildable

Homepage: http://www.rarlabs.com/

[wavemaker]

Re: What's this mean?

Thanks Fintan. What I meant was, I wanted some more icons to use, so I down loaded some and the down load was saved to the desk top. When I clicked on the downloaded icon to open it , I got the above message. So I did sudo apt-get install unrar, and now when I go to open the file it asks if I want to unzip, I click yes and I get a notification telling me the extracting operation failed. I will look into it further when I have time. Many thanks for your help.

[Snowhog]

Re: What's this mean?

Take a look at the manpage (manual page) information for the unrar utility and it's usage and options. Insight may be gained. unrar(1) - Linux man page

[opie]

Re: What's this mean?

It sounds as if the file you downloaded is either incomplete or corrupt.

rar is a compression format. Ark is the standard front end for compression tools under kde. unrar, the backend for rar type files, was not installed, hence the original message.
The new error message suggests unrar is now installed and functioning. If you right click the file and choose open with ark are you seeing any information about the files the archive contains?