ARX
ARX is a compressed archive utility for DOS, and associated file format. It was developed by Michael Kosior, and released as shareware.
This article is based on ARX v1.0, the only known version.
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Format details
ARX appears to be derived from LHarc circa v1.13. Its header format is not quite compatible with LHarc/LHA format. Its compressed data format appears to be the same.
Self-extracting archives
ARX has a function to convert an archive to a self-extracting archive, with potentially three different formats analogous to LHarc SFX v1.13c. However, ARX self-extracting archives do not appear to work properly.
Identification
ARX probably can be reliably distinguished from LHA, but more research is needed.
ASCII "-lh1-" appears at offset 2. (One might expect to see "lh0" instead of "lh1" if the first member file was not compressible, but ARX v1.0 seems to always use "lh1", possibly due to a bug.)
The byte at offset 21 has value 0x00. This normally won't happen with LHA header level 0 or 1, because that's the filename length field.
