topic Re: Uncompile in Operating System - HP-UX

Uncompile

Marcelo De Florio — Tue, 27 Mar 2001 14:31:01 GMT

Any body know any tool for uncompile executable C, to obtain source code.

MDF

Re: Uncompile

Edward Sedgemore — Tue, 27 Mar 2001 14:40:12 GMT

Not possible, not to mention illegal (if the binary was written by an external company)

Although I have heard that Microsoft wrote earlier versions of Exchange in Cobol then used a decompiler to convert the compiled Cobol to C source then compiled that for performance reasons as the finished article. Dont know if they still do it, I suspect so. So I guess its technically feasible to write a decompiler.

Re: Uncompile

John Bolene — Tue, 27 Mar 2001 15:59:48 GMT

I had to decompile Fortran to assembler on the mainframe and it was a really ugly process. I had to do this since the current source was lost and all I had was the last generation of code. You do not get all the symbolic info, just register and memory references.

You might be looking for a symbolic debugger, maybe Q4 would work.

What are you trying to do? More information would help us help you.

Re: Uncompile

f. halili — Tue, 27 Mar 2001 19:34:01 GMT

A source file would require a listing of variable names, procedure or paragraph names, comments which were initially in the source file, and the original language itself.

Those information are not contained in compiled code, so we cannot re-create the source file.

Re: Uncompile

Rajeev Tyagi — Wed, 28 Mar 2001 13:54:30 GMT

You can use strings command on binary file to trace what system calls are used by the compiled program.

Eg. #strings ypcat.