How can u rip apart dll files...i mean edit them using some decomplier or something..

[Girl_needs_help]

first of all when you install a new program, which is the main file, which runs the actual program. is it the dll or any other file, which contains the code for the actual program and how can i open them to see how the coding was done...do i need to download any program to open d dll or the main program's coding file...

[punkrawk]

um, i do believe u are trying to crack closed-source code. only open source code programs let u see their guts. i could be wrong tho. r u studying it for a C++ class or something?

[Girl_needs_help]

i m studying C++ and was told by the lecturer to use editors and stuff like dat to dismentle program's main files. its not for hacking though. second thing if its packed or not open-source, can u open it anyhow or u cant...

[cjohnson]

Just to clarify-
In general when a program is compiled it gets turned into machine code with 'stubs' where library functions should go (I say 'in general' because Java, for example, normally compiles into byte code for the java vm). So these compiled files (.exe, .dll, .whatever) are just a bunch of machine instructions in a file. There are programs you can get that will take those machine instructions (which are in binary) and translate them into human-readable assembly (assembly is essentially human-readable version of machine instructions so it's not really a big jump). So, in a sense, you can view the code (atleast at the asm level) for any program. You can get other programs that will try and convert that asm into a higher level language like C.

You probably won't see the source code exactly the way the original programmer wrote it, for example if originally there was a loop like:

for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
printf("Hi\n");
printf("Out of loop\n");

The compiler might turn that into something like

mov eax, 0
l2: cmp eax 10
jge l1:
print "Hi" ;For the sake of brevity
inc eax
jmp l2
l1: print "Out of loop"

Then when another program tries to turn that back into a higher level language it make make it into

int i = 0;
while (i < 10) {
printf("Hi!\n");
i = i + 1;
}
printf("Out of loop");

So chances are the machine code you try to turn back into higherlevel code isn't going to be exactly the same (though it should accomplish the same task).

Hope this helps.

[kpxgq]

and this is why i dropped out of CS as my major....

[punkrawk]

Originally posted by kpxgq
and this is why i dropped out of CS as my major....

werd.

[Lord Vetinari]

You should be able to use an x86 decompliler such as w32dasm to decompile both .exe and .dll files.