How to run an exe in linux? - c++

suppose I have a .exe file and i want it to run in Linux without using wine tool.
i want to convert PE->ELF.
can anyone help how to programatically do this?
Thanks,
Sujitha.kv

You essentially need to strip all the interesting code parts from the EXE, but none of the PE specific information and then re-assemble and re-link the code into an ELF file. This will require some reverse engineering and a lot of manual work.
This would be very difficult, so I suggest you simply use WINE.

it's not possible cause it's a totally different OS!
the only way is to make it run through a program like Wine

Related

How can I obfuscate an EXE file?

I have an EXE file. It comes from a Qt C++ Visual Studio project.
I would like to obfuscate this EXE.
The main reason is that my URLs (for version files, API etc.) that I use in the program and any other strings can be easily edited with a HeX editor.
Thanks for your help.
I used UPX packer and it works well.
You can easily reverse UPX Packer. With the -d Option !
Semantic Design might be interesting.
For DLLS you can try : https://freeobfuscator.com/
But i am also looking for a better one.

Recompiling code while program execution

If I have a series of C/C++ programs that I need to build using Make , would it mess up the code run if I made changes to the code and recompiled while the program is executing an executable? Or is all the information preloaded in the executable before runtime?
Thanks.
This depends entirely on whatever operating system you're using.
Linux is perfectly happy continuing to execute a program whose binary has been removed, and replaced with a new binary.
It is my understanding that Microsoft Windows is, on the other hand, rather grumpy in the same situation, and won't be happy if something like this is attempted.
If I am understanding correctly, you can edit the code while you run the program and the program will not change while you run it.

I can't go to a directory with C++

I need to change working directory of my project, so that output files go to a certain folder, not where all the project files are.
I'm using
system("cd secretdir/");
system("ls");
However, what I get, is the list of files in current project directory, not the "secretdir" one.
I'm on Mac OS X 10.6/Qt Creator 4.7 64 bit
Thanks!
You have to change the current working directory
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/programming-9/how-to-change-current-working-directory-in-c-550031/
Also, you should consider saving your output files with full path names instead of changing the working directory.
Your current code will spawn a subshell that will change its current directory to ./secretdir, then proceed to exit() without doing anything else.
Only then will ls run in another subshell, whose current directory is, of course, completely independent of what you did during your previous call to system().
That's probably where your problem lies. Are you looking for the chdir() function?
chdir("secretdir");
// From now on, the current directory of the process is `./secretdir`.
system("ls"); // Will probably behave as expected.
edit See Falmarri's response as I glossed over the first sentence of your question.
You can also use chdir
the following is crufty
The first system spawns a new process that does the cd. The second system spawns a completely different process that doesn't know what happened previously.
One thing you could do is:
system("ls secretdir/");
I'd highly recommend checking out QDir, QFile, and QProcess objects in the QT Creator help or online documentation since you are using it. They have very detailed and easy to understand documentation and using the tools available to you in QT should be a primary reason for choosing that tool much of QT rivals boost in portability and usability in my limited experience.
Also there is a great community for QT related questions at QTForum worth bookmarking especially if QT Creator is your primary development environment.
Using system should be avoided as general rule of thumb it is inefficient and insecure in many cases.
EDIT: Sorry I too glossed over your first sentence and jumped to the code bits. You can modify the project settings via the Projects tab in QT Creator to add a Custom Process step to the build where you can specify a working directory and then do a copy command to wherever you would like your output to go. You also may be able to specify a build output option within your .pro file directly ... once again the help and documentation is your friend however.
The function on Mac OSX is chdir("./secretdir"), although since it's a POSIX API it actually works the same on many other platforms as well.
Using system() is not portable so try to avoid to use directly "cd" like that. My advice is to use Boost filesystem.
There is a Two-minutes Tutorial !
Do
system("cd secretdir/; ls");
Or better yet use boost's filesystem library. Maybe just opendir.

Port Visual Studio C++ to Linux

We have a not very complicated but big (i.e. lots of files) Visual Studio C++ Win32 Console written in C++0x standard in VS2010.
It does not use any non standard code or anything (Hopefully!).
I now wanna port it to Linux.
Which way is the quickest way to do it?
autoconf?
old-fashioned make file?
any other solution?
I would use regular make but keep it simple with default rules as much as possible. Add in dependencies as you go along.
EDIT: As in interim step, build it with mingw so that you can avoid the whole API porting issue until you have a working build in your new build mechanism.
If your console app calls win32 API functions then you have a choice between modifying all the source where it is used or writing a module that implements those functions.
In prior porting efforts of this type I tried it both ways and the latter was easier. I ended up writing only about 18 to 20 shim functions.
It was successful enough that I ended up writing an OS abstraction layer that was used on many projects that simply let me compile on Windows native, cygwin, Linux, VxWorks, etc. with trivial changes to one or two files.
(p.s. Any interest in an open source version of a C++ based OS abstraction layer? I was thinking of releasing an unencumbered version of it to the world if there's sufficient interest. It's mostly useful where BOOST is too heavy -- i.e. embedded projects.)
Most probably you don't need autoconf (and I suggest you don't touch it, unless you love pain), because you are not trying to be portable to a dozen of Unix flavours.
Roll your Makefiles manually. It shouldn't be too difficult if you have a set of shared rules and have minimal Makefiles that just specify source files and compile options.
Use GCC 4.5 as it supports more C++0x features.
You can export a make file from Visual Studio.
Update: Actually you can't anymore, unless you have VC6 lying around
STAY AWAY FROM AUTO* and configure. These are horrible IMHO.
If you can somehow get a VS 8 or 9 vcproj/sln, you can use this. I have not used it, so I can't give any advice.
If you're up to manual conversion, I would suggest something like CMake, as it's pretty easy to get ready fast enough, even for large projects.
If the project has a simple layout, you could have success using Qt 4's qmake like this:
qmake -project
It will output a qmake .pro file, which can be converted into a makefile on many platforms (using qmake). This should work okay, but not perfectly. Alternatively, you can install the Qt plugin for VS, and let it generate the pro file from an existing VS project. It will make your build system depend on Qt4's qmake, which is probably not what you want.
There are of course other things like cmake, but they will all require manual intervention.
The fastest way to do it?
g++ *.cpp -o myapp
Seriously, depending on your needs, even generating a makefile might be overkill. If you're just interested in a quick and dirty "let's see if we can get a working program on Linux", just throw your code files at g++ and see what happens.

keeping Eclipse-generated makefiles in the version control - any issues to expect?

we work under Linux/Eclipse/C++ using Eclipse's "native" C++ projects (.cproject). the system comprises from several C++ projects all kept under svn version control, using integrated subclipse plugin.
we want to have a script that would checkout, compile and package the system, without us needing to drive this process manually from eclipse, as we do now.
I see that there are generated makefile and support files (sources.mk, subdir.mk etc.), scattered around, which are not under version control (probably the subclipse plugin is "clever" enough to exclude them). I guess I can put them under svn and use in the script we need.
however, this feels shaky. have anybody tried it? Are there any issues to expect? Are there recommended ways to achieve what we need?
N.B. I don't believe that an idea of adopting another build system will be accepted nicely, unless it's SUPER-smooth. We are a small company of 4 developers running full-steam ahead, and any additional overhead or learning curve will not appreciated :)
thanks a lot in advance!
I would not recommend putting things that are generated in an external tool into version control. My favorite phrase for this tactic is "version the recipe, not the cake". Instead, you should use a third party tool like your script to manipulate Eclipse appropriately to generate these files from your sources, and then compile them. This avoids the risk of having one of these automatically generated files be out of sync with your root sources.
I'm not sure what your threshold for "super-smooth" is, but you might want to take a look at Maven2, which has a plugin for Eclipse projects to do just this.
I know that this is a big problem (I had exactly the same; in addition: maintaining a build-workspace in svn is a real pain!)
Problems I see:
You will get into problems as soon as somebody adds or changes project settings files but doesn't trigger a new build for all possible platforms! (makefiles aren't updated).
There is no overall make file so you can not easily use the build order of your projects that Eclipse had calculated
BTW: I wrote an Eclipse plugin that builds up a workspace from a given (textual) list of projects and then triggers the build. That's possible but also not an easy task.
Unfortunately I can't post the plugin somewhere because I wrote it for my former employer...