lha

35 years of .lzh archiver history, now distributed as a single self-contained static binary.

lha is the maintained fork of jca02266/lha (LHa for UNIX 1.14i-ac20220213). We don't maintain lha — we just build static binaries of it for every major platform.

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Static binaries · no libc install required on any Linux, macOS, or Windows.

Latest release · upstream · Security audit · Efficiency bench · FAQ · Build audit · Algorithm

TL;DR. lha is a 35-year-old file archiver (the format behind .lzh archives, dominant on Japanese PCs and MS-DOS through the 1990s) distributed here as a single self-contained static binary — ~150 KB, zero external dependencies, every Linux distro / macOS / Windows. The vendored source is jca02266/lha at commit 86094cb (LHa for UNIX 1.14i-ac20220213); this repo only builds static binaries of it. Who should care: anyone unpacking a 30-year-old .lzh on a system without a 1990s-era archiver, CI artifact publishers who want a single 150-KB binary that doesn't drag libz / libiconv / libcurl into the build, and the ljh-sh static-binary distribution convention generally. What this site is: a 5-axis source audit of the vendored C, a compress + decompress benchmark against tar / tar.gz / zip, a build-tool risk review, and a FAQ that captures every "why" question we've worked through. What this site is not: an lha-rs project, a tANS rewrite, a new .lh8- format, or anything that would touch the vendored source. The vendored 1.14i stays untouched — the goal is a stable, auditable, no-deps binary for the next 35 years.

What is lha?

LHA (originally LHarc) is a file-compression and archival format created in 1988-1989 by Haruyasu Yoshizaki (a.k.a. Y.Tagawa). It uses the LZARI/LZHUF algorithms (arithmetic coding variants of LZ77 + Huffman) and the dominant archive format on MS-DOS and Japanese PCs through the 1990s, long before ZIP became universal.

lha (the binary) handles every common LZH variant (-lh0-, -lh1-, -lh4-, -lh5-, -lh6-, -lh7-, -lhx-, -lzs-, and the -lhd- directory header) plus the legacy LArc and PMarc formats. The modern fork is mostly used for unpacking ancient .lzh archives on systems where nothing else will open them.

Usage. Four commands — compress, decompress, list, print:

  lha c archive.lzh file1 file2   # compress
  lha x archive.lzh               # decompress / extract
  lha l archive.lzh               # list (ls)
  lha p archive.lzh file          # print to stdout (cat)

install: x eget use lha · static binary, ~150 KB, zero deps

A brief history

1988–1989 — LHarc and LZARI

Haruyasu Yoshizaki (Y.Tagawa) released the original LHarc for MS-DOS in 1988-1989. It was the first widely used archive format in Japan to combine the LZARI arithmetic-coding variant of LZ77 with static Huffman. LZARI was originally published by Haruhiko Okumura; Tagawa's contribution was making it practical as an archive format.

1990–1991 — LZH enters

Yoshizaki refined the algorithm into LZHUF (LZ77 + dynamic Huffman), released as the LHA format in 1990. The archive header baked the compression method into the filename suffix, which is why your old .lzh ends in -lh5- or similar. Some modern compressors handle this transparently; LHA-encoders choose the method explicitly.

1991–1993 — LHA for UNIX

Masaru Oki ported LHA to UNIX in 1991. Nobutaka Watazaki took over maintenance and rewrote most of the codebase in 1993, producing the canonical LHa for UNIX that ships to this day in long-tail distributions. The man page we still ship with this binary credits M. Oki and N. Watazaki — it's the same source.

LHA for UNIX used a custom freeware license that required attribution, disallowed calling derived works "LHA", and explicitly forbade binary-only redistribution without contacting the maintainer. This is why, to this day, Debian ships it under non-free/contrib.

1994–2010 — ZIP era, J2K file format

PKZIP 2.0 (1993) and Info-ZIP zip (1994 onward) displaced LHA on Western PCs. In Japan, .lzh archives remained in heavy use through the early 2000s — popular websites served LZH for distribution, BBS attach them as a matter of course, and Windows .exe self-extracting archives used the LHA format extensively. J2K / 2ch-style bulletin boards exchanged LZH files well into the 2000s.

2010–2020 — quiet maintenance

File sizes and bandwidth grew; LHA's small-adder CPU cost stopped mattering. 7-Zip's LZMA + .7z delivered much better ratios. Watazaki's LHA for UNIX tree got the occasional patch but no new releases.

2022 — autoconf revival (jca02266)

In 2022, GitHub user jca02266 picked up the dormant tree and gave it a modern autoconf build. The result — LHa for UNIX 1.14i-ac20220213 — is what's vendored under upstream/lha/ in this repo. The original C source, the man pages, and the upstream test suite are all unchanged.

jca02266's autoconf work is the first time the format became trivially buildable on any modern Linux distro without hand-patching Makefiles. ljh-sh/lha takes that and produces pre-built static binaries so end users don't even need to apt install build-essential.

Compression methods supported

Suffix	Algorithm	Notes
`-lh0-`	stored (no compression)	Used for fast archiving. The meta header still records the method so older tools decode it correctly.
`-lh1-`	LZARI (LZ77 + arithmetic)	Original LHarc method. Only the original MS-DOS toolchain wrote this; most archives you'll encounter are `-lh5-`.
`-lh4-`	LZARI variant	Reserved for future use. Rare in the wild.
`-lh5-`	LZHUF (LZ77 + dynamic Huffman)	The default. The standard LZH format since 1990. What you'll most often encounter as `.lzh` today.
`-lh6-`	LZARI+static Huffman variant	Experimental. Not widely seen.
`-lh7-`	LZHUF+tree variant	Experimental.
`-lhx-`	LZH-compatibility marker	Means the archive uses the updated LZH conventions with a separate `-lhd-` directory header.
`-lzs-`	LZARI variant	Reserved.

Beyond the compression methods, lha also reads and writes the legacy LArc and PMarc formats (configurable at configure time). See lha --help for current defaults.

Download

Each archive contains:

bin/lha — the binary
man/man1/lha.1 — the man page
README.md — install instructions

Latest releases at github.com/ljh-sh/lha/releases.

Fastest path on macOS / Linux (one shell line):

x i lha           # x-cmd install database (resolves via x.eget → ljh-sh/lha)
x eget use lha    # eget's bare-name resolver — equivalent, hits the same release

Both one-liners detect your OS + arch automatically, fetch the matching static binary from releases/latest, extract it to ~/.local/bin/lha, and put it on PATH. No compiler, no Homebrew tap, no apt-add-repo.

Or grab the per-platform tarball/zip directly:

Platform	File	Notes
Linux x86_64	`lha-x86_64-linux-musl.tar.gz`	Fully static. Runs on every Linux distro (Alpine, Debian, RHEL, Arch…).
Linux ARM64	`lha-aarch64-linux-musl.tar.gz`	Fully static. Use on aarch64 Linux (e.g., Graviton, Ampere Altra, Pi 4/5 64-bit).
macOS Apple Silicon	`lha-aarch64-macos.tar.gz`	Linker uses system `libiconv` (always present on macOS).
macOS Intel	`lha-x86_64-macos.tar.gz`	Same link semantics. Cross-compiled from Apple Silicon; runs natively on Intel Macs and under Rosetta on Apple Silicon.
Windows x86_64	`lha-x86_64-windows.zip`	Built with MinGW; no VC redistributables needed.

Install (optional, manual):

tar xzf lha-x86_64-linux-musl.tar.gz
sudo install -m 0755 lha-x86_64-linux-musl/bin/lha /usr/local/bin/lha
sudo install -m 0644 lha-x86_64-linux-musl/man/man1/lha.1 /usr/local/share/man/man1/
man lha

Build it yourself

The wrapper scripts are plain POSIX shell. From the repo root:

git clone https://github.com/ljh-sh/lha.git
cd lha
bash scripts/build.sh         # host arch (autoreconf + configure + make)
cd upstream/lha && bash scripts/smoke.sh  # upstream test suite, 20 cases
cd ../../ && bash scripts/build-alpine.sh  # musl-static in alpine:3.20
bash scripts/build.sh  &&  bash scripts/smoke.sh  # host-side round-trip

See scripts/build.sh for the per-target flags (host vs musl vs MSYS2), and NOTICE.md for the upstream license terms that apply to the vendored binary.