From:	Andrew Cottrell <andnews AT ihug DOT com DOT oz DOT au>
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Re: unsupported coff header
Date:	Mon, 27 Jan 2003 10:17:48 +1100
Organization:	ECLiPSE
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>bash-2.04$ upx --best *.exe calc/*.exe expr/*.exe >> demo.log 2>&1
>
> upx: isprime.exe:      CantPackException: unsupported coff header

This is  aknown problem in UPX. In the latest UPX 1.2.4 it was
modified to not pack DJGPP exe's with the latest coff header. The
reason that this was done was that UPX can compress the exe and run
the resulting exe fine, but cannot decompress it using UPX back to the
original exe file and run it.

As Eli pointed out the problem was that the coff header changed and
the UPX maintainers changed the code to not compress the new coff
header.

If you wasnt to help out you could try to fix this yourself by looking
at the Binutils and UPX source to see what is required to get them
working.

>On further tests, the executables of InfoZIP's zip and unzip built
>with these tools could all be packed by UPX 1.24d while bzip2.exe
>and bzip2recover.exe from bzip2-1.02 were with unsupported coff
>headers.  The zips build no library while bzip2 does.  Is that a
>clue?  The behavior of gmp seems capricious.

All of the exe files you have downloaded from the 2.04 page will not
compress with UPX as they are all built with the Binutils that UPX
does not like. The files from Simtel may compress if they were built
with an old version of Binutils, but the latested Binutils is requried
in order to build some of the files so the only option is for someone
to look at the UPX source and fix it.

Andrew

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