Object file reader

A CLI utility written in C++ which dumps all the relevant information about an object file (its sections and symbols)

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Features
• Installation
• Usage
• License

Introduction

I wrote this utility to learn more about the ELF relocatable object file format, how it works, and wanted to write a potentially useful utility for people who want to inspect such files. There is plenty of work left to do on this project and this is far from done, I will be adding features to it as I see fit.

Todo:

• Add a more advanced argument handling with flags and such
• Add support for printing out the disassembled function symbol
• Add support to list all symbols per section
• Possibly think about adding a way to edit the object file

Some resources I used for this project:

• https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19120-01/open.solaris/819-0690/6n33n7fcb/index.html
• https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/bfd-2.9.1/html_node/bfd_toc.html
• http://www.skyfree.org/linux/references/ELF_Format.pdf
• https://sourceware.org/binutils/binutils-porting-guide.txt
• https://github.com/CyberGrandChallenge/binutils/blob/master/binutils/objdump.c

Features

• Read an object file and display the contents of it

Installation

Prerequisites:

You might need to install binutils

sudo apt-get install binutils-dev

To compile the project all you have to do is run make like so:

make

If you are using an editor like me which requires the compile_commands.json in order for the intellisense to work properly you can compile the project with

make compile-commands

Note: You will need to install the bear CLI which is used to output the compile_commands.json from a Makefile.

Usage

./object-reader <file name>

License

Specify the project's license. Choose an appropriate open-source license that suits your project's needs.