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LHARC was an early, freeware file compression and archiving utility for DOS and other platforms, originally developed by Haruyasu Yoshizaki in 1988. It is an early version of the compression utility that eventually came to be known as LHA.

Key details about LHARC:

Compression technology: LHARC files use a combination of the LZSS (Lempel-Ziv-Storer-Szymanski) algorithm and Huffman coding for compression. This allows multiple files and folders to be packaged into a single archive file.

Renaming: To avoid a naming conflict with an MS-DOS command, the software was renamed from LHarc, to LH, and finally to LHA. As a result, the terms LHarc, LHA, and LZH are often used interchangeably.

File extension: The files created by the LHA utility typically have the .lzh or .lha file extension. The .lzh extension is derived from the "Lempel-Ziv-Huffman" compression method used.

Historical popularity: While not widely used today, LHARC (and its successor LHA) gained significant popularity in Japan and was a common compression format on platforms like the Amiga and for early PC games, including titles from id Software.

Current support: While the original archiver is no longer in development, modern decompression tools like 7-Zip can still open and extract files from .lzh archives.