exe decompiler

[CarpeUK]

I am looking for a simple exe decompiler, i know one is out there as an old friend of mine used to have one and i no longer see him or have contact with him.

i need the source files of an exe but i am unable to find anything out there.

Thanks
CarpeUK

 

[ewilcox]

Sorry you are looking for a exe to source decompiler? Unlikely you will ever manage that. I can only think of a few situations in which that would be vaguely possible and you'd have to know the CLI from .NET a lot better than me to attempt that. Any decent software will have been released in a "Release Build" which means the best you'll be able to do is see the machine code generated by the program and this will be next to impossible to understand. If what you were suggesting was possible easily then software houses would be going bust left, right and center.

 

[CarpeUK]

Sorry you are looking for a exe to source decompiler? Unlikely you will ever manage that. I can only think of a few situations in which that would be vaguely possible and you'd have to know the CLI from .NET a lot better than me to attempt that. Any decent software will have been released in a "Release Build" which means the best you'll be able to do is see the machine code generated by the program and this will be next to impossible to understand. If what you were suggesting was possible easily then software houses would be going bust left, right and center.

Hmm...guess i must have got it wrong then. Ok thanks anyway thought i would put it out there just in case there where such a thing

 

[CarpeUK]

Sorry you are looking for a exe to source decompiler? Unlikely you will ever manage that. I can only think of a few situations in which that would be vaguely possible and you'd have to know the CLI from .NET a lot better than me to attempt that. Any decent software will have been released in a "Release Build" which means the best you'll be able to do is see the machine code generated by the program and this will be next to impossible to understand. If what you were suggesting was possible easily then software houses would be going bust left, right and center.

Just to let you know i did find what it was i thought i was looking for it is a resource viewer & decompiler but there is one snag i am unable to edit anything because it says it have been compressed with an exe compressor so the next question is, is there such thing as an exe decompressor or is it the same as an exe decompiler?

Regards
CarpeUK

 

[blackcab]

Search for 'disassembler' on sites like download.com (Neuron Shell looks likely) or sourceforge.net (TatraDAS and PEReaDeR look likely). You can easily convert machine code to assembler, but not to source code.

 

[dcraig1]

You are almost certainly wasting your time. In many years as a developer, I only resorted to disassembly a couple of times - once to find a fault in a C compiler and once to diagnose a UNIX kernel freeze. Unless your aims are very limited - to solve a specific problem - the effort involved is likely to be prohibitive, probably by several orders of magnitude.

I dunno about Windows, but on *nix systems tracing system calls is quite usefull in diagnosing problems with software that is less than helpful with error messages and for which you have no source. The tools are "strace" on Linux or "truss" on Solaris. If you can find something similiar for Win, that might help depending on what you are trying to do. Many debuggers have a disassembly facility eg "gdb" on Linux, but as I said you would be wasting your time.

 

[fat chance]

If it's a .NET program you can disassemble it into microsoft intermediate language I think, though I've never tried it... try googling for MSIL disassembler.