So, I decompressed an exe file and modified it, and I want to recompress it back to exe form, not an SFX archive.
I can't find an internet solution for my problem, all of the posts I look at talk about recompressing to an SFX file, which I do not want to do, I want to convert it to a fully working exe.
I think you are looking for IExpress.exe: https://www.maketecheasier.com/create-self-extracting-archives-without-installing-software/
Modifying a binary file without breaking it requires a knowledge of hex or assembly. You can't just decompress and compress it back.
How ever there are tools that has ability to make some minor changes to an exe file. This one is an example. Those tools can only alter exe file's resources like icons, some of the texts, images etc.
Hope this helped.
Related
Is there a way to scan a .jar file to see each step that the program takes? I just ask because I found a .jar file that will supposedly generate pdf files for me out of Tableau. Unfortunately, I am not familiar with the author of the .jar file and want to make sure that I'm not getting something I don't want.
I also have a similar issue with an .exe file. Is there a way to scan the .exe file to see the steps that it takes?
Yes to both.
Jar is easier, there are a few jar decompilers. Classy Shark is simple to use.
There's also the JetBrains decompiler org.jetbrains.java.decompiler.main.decompiler.ConsoleDecompiler which makes a little cleaner code, but is more complex to install.
For exe files, it depends on how it was created, if it's .Net, then you can pull it apart pretty easily with ILSpy.
If the exe was written in something else, it gets much more complicated fast.
Background (not necessary to read)
I'm tinkering with MS office files for work (trying to figure out the quickest, easiest way to automate generation of arbitrary-length excel and powerpoint files). Since actual excel files are just zipped archives with .xlsx appended to the filename, I've been unzipping them, editing the xml, rezipping them, and seeing whether OpenOffice can still load them.
However, I've realized (after not too much such testing, thankfully) that, by default, the 'zip' command in bash (or, at least, on my mac) is zipping the files in a format that only requires unzip v1.0 to extract, but normal excel files are zipped in such a way that they require v2.0 to extract. I checked this is a problem by zipping and unzipping an excel file that I knew loaded normally, and then trying to load it. OpenOffice was displeased.
So, I know I need to make the file zip exactly the way excel does, but how to make that happen I'm not sure. I have zip version 3 on my computer, so hopefully if the zip/unzip release cycles are synchronized it should be possible, but I didn't see anything on the man page that immediately seemed to be the solution.
edit:
And zip -9 (which zip -h helpfully says instructs zip to 'zip better') still only requires v1.0 to extract.
Question:
How can I specify in bash that I want zip to zip a file in such a way that it would require unzip v2.0 to unzip?
Often, the reason for an incompatibility between compressed files produced by different versions is the compression algorithm used. If the files were compressed with an algorithm that didn't exist in zip 1.0, that would cause the incompatibility you're seeing.
Look at the man page for your zip utility, see if there's an option to specify the type of compression to use. If there is, look at the existing files created from Excel, and find out what type of compression algorithm they're compressed with, and use that.
On my Linux system, zip reports "This is Zip 2.31 (March 8th 2005), by Info-ZIP.", and it does not have an option for specifying the compression algorithm. On my Windows system, 7-zip does have the option, and it looks like they do have a Mac version available, so you could try that if your zip utility doesn't support that option.
is it possible to change text and images in a fla file without ever opening it up and then making the swf via command line? I want to make a flash template and save the fla. Then be able to update my text and image name and convert it to swf. I have one template but tons of different text options and background images. It would be nice to be able to copy the master.fla twenty times and just change the source code (will do this from command line) and then convert to swf (via command line).
Any help would be appreciated.
With CS5, you can do half of what you're asking today, by using the XFL file format instead of FLA. Instead of a binary blob, you get an editable XML file and a tree of separate asset files: PNGs, AS3 files, etc. You can then modify the XML or AS3 files programmatically to get your variants.
(A CS5 FLA file is really just a zipped up version of the XFL, but there's no advantage to using that instead of an XFL. In CS4 and previous, FLA was a proprietary binary format.)
The missing piece is an XFL compiler. Adobe currently provides no such thing, and the third party market hasn't yet produced one.
You could use a systems automation tool to drive the Flash Professional environment through the compilation steps. On OS X, for example, either Automator or AppleScript should be able to do what you want. It'll just have more overhead than the command line compiler you were hoping for.
I agree with Jason, there are a lot of alternatives to what you suggest. Keeping content out of the SWF is good practice actually. This is a good way to avoid large files!
Depending on what you 're looking to achieve, there are a lot of solutions available. XML is an option, JSON another.
If you're looking to build a template, any of the above would seem appropriate.
It sounds like you're working from the Flash IDE, as Jason suggests you may want to have a look at another IDE, such as FlashDevelop, FDT or FlashBuilder as they make coding with AS3 a lot easier.
I'm trying to get my website to talk to a friend's program. Think ITunes - one main program with hundreds of thousands of little things installed into it. We don't want to have to create an InstallShield install program for each of those hundreds of thousands of little things.
We have the files grouped into the folder sub-structure.
We have a .REG file for what registry entry needs to be added to see the new folder group.
But is there a way to do a self extracting zip file that reads a registry entry so we know where they installed the original program to be able to dump the new files there as well? I want them to double-click the EXE and click Finish and for everything to work.
(I've been looking into INF and CAB files through IExpress.exe, but haven't found the answer. I remember Package for the Web didn't have an option to read a registry entry, but did let you modify the suggested install path.)
Thanks so much.
Best wishes,
Andrea
But is there a way to do a self extracting zip file that reads a registry entry so we know where they installed the original program to be able to dump the new files there as well? I want them to double-click the EXE and click Finish and for everything to work
Well, yes and no. There are self-extractors that can run a program after extracting all files. DotNetZip, for example, can produce an SFX which can do this.
Just an aside: a normal SFX is just a zip file, with a "stub" executable merged with it. The stub exe can do anything it wants to do, but the most basic thing it does is extract the files in the zip. When you use DotNetZip to produce an SFX, it embeds its particular stub into the zip. That stub knows how to extract files, and also knows how to invoke a program after extracting. You can also produce your own stub that can do other more exotic things.
So you could use an SFX for your purpose. When run, it would extract, then invoke it's extra program. The program could look in the registry, then move or relocate the extracted files to the appropriate place. Then terminate.
For a different twist, the SFX might have just two files: the program-to-run (the one that reads the registry, and another embedded zip. Then when the SFX runs it generates 2 files. Then it invokes the program-to-run, which reads the registry, then unpacks the contained zip and puts the files into the desired place.
Ok, so you could do it.
Should you?
mmm, maybe. This really is an installer, so, you should decide whether you want to use a zip as an installer. Don't forget, if you use an SFX as an installer, there's no good way to uninstall.
Have you tried Inno Setup toolchain? It's a bit better than a bare Self-Extracting ZIP file, it's a setup creation utility. I'm convinced it has got something to put some entry in the Registry, look also at the plugins.
Basically, a self-extracting executable that alters the registry, it's a setup program. So why don't you go for a proper one?
Website: http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php
I want to distribute a cross-platform application for which the executable file is slightly different, depending on the user who downloaded it. This is done by having a placeholder string somewhere in the executable that is replaced with something user-specific upon download.
The webserver that has to do these string replacements is a Linux machine. For Windows, the executable is not compressed in the installer .exe, so the string replacement is easy.
For uncompressed Mac OS X .dmg files, this is also easy. However, .dmg files that are compressed with either gzip or bzip2 are not so easy. For example, in the latter case, the compressed .dmg is not one big bzip2-compressed disk image, but instead consists of a few different bzip2-compressed parts (with different block sizes) and a plist suffix. Also, decompressing and recompressing the different parts with bzip2 does not result in the original data, so I'm guessing Apple uses some different parameters to bzip2 than the command-line tool.
Is there a way to generate a compressed .dmg from an uncompressed one on Linux (which does not have hdiutil)? Or maybe another suggestion for creating customized applications without pregenerating them? It should work without any input by the user.
I realize that I'm a bit too late here, but we wanted to do exactly the same thing and got it to work using libdmg. https://github.com/planetbeing/libdmg-hfsplus
Basically, you can use libdmg to unpack a dmg file to an uncompressed file containing a hfs+ file system, play around with the files inside the hfs+ file system, and them put it back together again as a dmg file with the correct checksums.
If you use any fancy dmg features, like showing an EULA before the image is mounted, then these will not survive the process. Background images and so on work, though.
If your web server and client support the gzip encoding, then you can deal with uncompressed files on the server, but have them compressed / decompressed on the fly by the web server / web client respectively.
e.g. apache's mod_gzip.
Otherwise maybe you can split your dmg into 3 parts:
the stuff before what you want to replace
the string you want to replace
the stuff after what you want to replace
If the gzip stream is splittable at those points, you could just concatenate the front and back onto the gzipped string you want to replace. That would let you generate it on the fly.
Release a normal, read-only, compressed dmg. Then bundle your app in a package installer with a pre-flight script that sets the variables you need.