Weird thing with Linux Archive Manager and windows executables ?

[GoofKing]

So after downloading some windows executables, I've noticed that you could unpack I guess part of the assembly files included with the programs using Archive Manager.

My main question is can you actually use another program to open whatever files Archive Manager unpacked in some text editor ? With Archive Manager, it displays something like .rsrc .reloc and .text when you use it on a windows executable file. Has this been around for some quite time ?

 

[Whatisknown]

Te reason it opens the exe with archive manager is because linux can't run .exe files without wine which allows you to use windows products on linux machine.

 

[dragonwolf]

Like Whatisknown said, Linux doesn't know what to do with them, so it unarchives them.

You can open those files....sort of. Text editors will open them, but because they're binary files, you'll end up with what looks like garbage (for the most part, some applications do have plain text files for configurations and such).

However, you can decompile the executables with a decompiling program (you'll have to ask Google for that one), which can allow you to see the source code. Do keep in mind that probably violates the license agreement for that software and is questionable in its legality.

 

[0x5279616e]

What you're seeing is a very simple collection of what an executable actually is - the .text file is the code from that application that's been converted to machine language (Assembly). Messing around with that, even a little, can drastically change what occurs during runtime on a Windows machine (assuming it's been properly repackaged). If you're looking to get into some more in depth debugging tools, I'd recommend taking a look into OllyDbg or IDA. OllyDbg is older and limited to debugging instructions for a 32-bit architecture. On Windows, a good debugger to look into would be x64dbg. If you need any help or guidance on debugging, please PM me!