Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/08/14/18:02:34
JRRuper wrote:
>
> If I wanted to reverse engineer my own stuff what would I need and how would i
> do it?
> just wondering..
> the learning never stops :)
Well, assuming that you have your program's executable or object code,
but somehow managed to totally lose the source code, the best
recommendation I would have would be to pray that you have a printout or
recent backup. :-) I have a little story about that myself; I had a
program which I was distributing for testing, and shortly thereafter my
hard drives went haywire in an upgrade. Although the problem was
eventually resolved, I recovered my work by asking the people whom I'd
emailed my source code to send it back.
In the total absence of source code, you basically have two choices.
One: recreate the program from memory, or rewrite it from scratch.
Two: attempt to disassemble and decompile the code. While disassembly
is trivial (gdb can do it, for example), decompilation is a difficult
undertaking even if you know what language the source code was
originally written in. If you stripped the debugging labels, it becomes
even more of a headache (from what I understand). And even if all goes
perfectly, the very best you can expect to get is something that is
vaguely similar to what you wrote originally; you'll have to put in a
lot of work to restore the code. Not impossible, but not worth the
effort unless it's your last resort.
--
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| ObJoke: If Bill Gates were a robber, not only would he |
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