From: "John M. Aldrich" Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: Okay, I have to ask this Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1998 00:59:34 -0400 Organization: Two pounds of chaos and a pinch of salt. Lines: 35 Message-ID: <35D3C436.8E59BE4F@cs.net> References: <35C3BC96 DOT 8DBD2960 AT a DOT crl DOT com> <1998081323151900 DOT TAA05635 AT ladder01 DOT news DOT aol DOT com> NNTP-Posting-Host: ppp108.cs.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Precedence: bulk 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. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- | John M. Aldrich, aka Fighteer I | mailto:fighteer AT cs DOT net | | ICQ UIN#: 7406319 | http://www.cs.net/fighteer/ | | ObJoke: If Bill Gates were a robber, not only would he | | shoot you, but he'd send you a bill for the bullets. | ---------------------------------------------------------------------