How can i select all RAR archives in a folder and it's subfolders?

Question

so that i can quickly move them all into the same folder to unarchive them. This is after i've decompressed a bunch of zips. Unless someone can tell me how to get 'the unarchiver' to be less dumb, and find the other pieces on it's own. I am constantly getting audio and video in this stupid file arrangement, obviously the work of an evil windows warlock.
like this
[folder]
somefile.xyz.01
[folder]
somefile.xyz.02
[folder]
somefile.xyz.03
and so on. It is driving me completely crazy because it seems like it should be such a natural thing to tell the OS- 'hey, select all the files all the way down into all the subfolders within this folder that are like this one.'
i will set up a shrine and tell tales of your greatness througout the land if you can help me figure this out.

Answer 1

Here's what you do...
open a console window at the root directory that contains all of the .zip files.
After you open all of the zip files you'll have a directory full of subdirectories that contain your .rar files.
Make sure your console window is pointed at the root. If you type "ls" (without the quotes) in the console you should get a directory listing showing all of the subfolders.
Now type this command into the console:
find ./ -iname "*.rar" -exec mv {} ./ \;
This command will recursively find all of the .rar files within the parent directory and then move them to the root level of the parent directory.
Now all of the .rar's will be at the same level and you can use your tool of choice to unrar them.
OOPs, I meant terminal window, NOT console window.
After I wrote this response I put together a little automator workflow and saved it as a service. Seems to work well. Just open automator and create a service. Specify that the service accepts folders from the finder. Then add a single component which is "run shell script". Set the shell script to pass input as arguments. The shell script should be set to contain this:
for f in "$@"
do
          cd $f
          find ./ -iname "*.rar" -exec mv {} ./ \;
done
Save with a service name: I use "unrar subfolders".
Now you simply right click on the parent folder that contains subdirectories that have segments of .rar archives. Pick the service that you created and the magic will happen and all .rar files will be at the parent level. Make sure you right click the parent folder and not just one of the .rar subfolders, that won't work.
This script can easily be modified to also do the unzip step and clean up afterwards but I like to keep my actions simple and short to avoid unintended consequences.
Those of you following along might notice that the script in fact can operate on several folders so if you select a set of folders and right click it should process all of them in turn. I haven't tested that!
The useful trick that can be used again and again is the "find ./ ########### -exec ####### ./ \;" sequence. This will recursively search from the current parent directory and execute another command on everything that the search finds. The search can be as complex as you like as can the execution step. Just make sure you really know which directory is the current parent because you can easily wind up firing this up from your account root or even system root and do nasty things!!!!!