Pakka documentation

Pakka is a C library (libpakka) for reading, writing, and editing the archive formats used by id Software, Ritual, Ion Storm, and Valve game engines — Quake 1 / 2 and Half-Life / GoldSrc PAK, SiN SPAK, Daikatana PAK, Doom IWAD / PWAD, Quake 3 PK3, and Doom 3 PK4. The pakka(1) command-line tool is a thin wrapper around the same API.

The project README is the quickstart and launching-off point. These pages are the supporting reference.

Reference

• Installation — build options, install layout, Windows MSVC build, DEFLATE backend selection.
• Format support — compression policies, Daikatana codec, ZIP feature subset, links to per-format on-disk references.
• Using libpakka from C — API inventory grouped by responsibility, structured-error model, threading and ownership rules.
• Security — full entry-name rejection rules, normalized-collision preflight, symlink / reparse handling, decompression-bomb cap.
• Supported platforms — full CI matrix, legacy floor, additional CI jobs (lint, fuzz, sanitizers, coverage, zlib-backend, win32 lint).
• Testing — Windows CTest path, realpak opt-in suites, make lint.

On-disk format references

For format internals — directory geometry, header layout, byte ordering, codec opcode tables — see the per-format pages:

• Quake PAK — "PACK", 56-byte names, 64-byte directory entries.
• SiN — "SPAK", 120-byte names, 128-byte directory entries.
• Daikatana — 72-byte entries, custom byte-codec opcode table.
• PK3 / PK4 — ZIP container subset.
• Doom WAD — IWAD / PWAD, 16-byte entries, 8-byte lump names, duplicates allowed.
• Windows codepage — PK3 / PK4 filename encoding policy on Windows.

Releases

See the GitHub releases page for source tarballs and pre-built binaries (Windows x64 / x86, macOS Intel / Apple Silicon) — plus library-only libpakka zips for Windows — each with SHA-256 sidecars.

License

MIT — see LICENSE in the repository.