lha

Additional Notes

lha is an archiver for the LZH (Lempel-Ziv-Huffman) compression format, which was historically common on MS-DOS, Amiga, and early Windows systems. It can create, extract, and list LZH archives.

While largely superseded by zip, tar.gz, and 7z on modern systems, lha is still useful for extracting legacy archives from old BBS archives, shareware collections, and retrocomputing projects.

Syntax

lha <command> [options] archive [file...]

Parameters

• command: The operation to perform (see common commands below).
• archive: The LZH archive file to operate on.
• file: One or more files to extract or add.

Common Commands

• x: Extract files from the archive, preserving directory structure.
• e: Extract files from the archive, ignoring directory structure.
• l: List the contents of the archive.
• v: Verbose listing with details (compression ratio, path, etc.).
• t: Test the integrity of the archive.
• a: Add files to the archive.
• u: Update files in the archive.
• d: Delete files from the archive.

Common Options

• -w dir: Set the working directory for extraction.
• -m: Do not restore file modification times.
• -q: Quiet mode, suppress most messages.

Examples

lha l archive.lzh

List the contents of archive.lzh.

lha x archive.lzh

Extract all files from archive.lzh, preserving paths.

lha e archive.lzh

Extract all files into the current directory, ignoring paths.

lha t archive.lzh

Test the archive for integrity.

lha a archive.lzh file.txt

Add file.txt to archive.lzh.

Practical Notes

• Command letters are not preceded by a dash. The first argument is the command letter.
• Modern alternatives include 7z (7-Zip), which can also extract LZH files.
• The LZH format is less efficient than modern compression and is rarely used for new archives.