Creating .dll file without null characters - dll

Is there any way to design small and simple dll file, that after compiling won't contain any 0x00 character?
There are a few projects like tinyPE, but they are focused on size not on the target file.

If a DLL file contains string constants, those strings need to end with a null byte anyway. You can't prevent a null byte from appearing in a DLL. Each byte is put in a DLL for a reason.

There are too many fields in the PE-header that just HAVE to contain 0-bytes to be valid to make this work. For example the ImageBase field in the IMAGE_OPTIONAL_HEADER is required to be a multiple of 64k, or Windows will refuse to load your binary. Also consider file addresses in the header: your file must be HUGE to not contain zeros in 32-bit (or even 64-bit on AMD64) file addresses.

Related

What is the meaning of the file names flanked by the '#' sign and how can I remove them?

When I do the 'ls' command in the terminal on my Raspberry Pi 2, I see different types of names of files, some like "#example.cpp#", as well as others like "homework1.cpp~".
What do these two file types mean, and how can I get rid of them? Simply using the 'rm' command doesn't seem to be working for me. Thanks!
Some applications will create a copy of a file and use special characters when creating the filename for the copy. For instance some text editors will make a copy of a file you are starting to edit by using the same name and adding a tilde character (~) to the end of the file. That way you will have a backup of the file that you are about to edit.
Another reason would be if an application is processing the file into a temporary file with the temporary file then being used for the next step. For example perhaps the C/C++ compiler is reading the file homework1.cpp with the C Preprocessor to generate the temporary file #homework1.cpp# which is then compiled by the compiler to generate the object code file.
I am not familiar with raspberry pi so am not sure as to what may be creating the filenames with the pound sign (#) on the front and back. Perhaps it is the C++ compiler. I am pretty sure the files with the tilde character on appended to the end of the file name is a back file from vi or vim containing a copy of the file at the time it was last opened with the text editor.
One thing that you could do is to look in those files to see what is there using a Linux command or a text editor. If you use a text editor I would copy the file to another folder as a back up and then look at it there.
Edit: Someone just posted and then deleted an answer which also mentioned about how to remove these files.
What I read was that the rm command is used however for some kinds of special characters you will need to use quotes around the name and you may also need to use an escape to escape certain special characters.
The command shell reads the command line you type in and makes changes to the text before passing it on to the command you type in. So if the filename has a space in it, say jj Johny then when you remove the file you have to specify rm "jj Johny" since spaces are used by the command processor to separate out arguments.
The other poster mentioned that you had to escape out the pound sign (#) using the back slash character in order to prevent it from being modified by the command processor.

Saving CSV file with degree symbol and ASCII encoded

I have string variable txt. It contains "°" degree symbol. I would like to save string into CSV file ASCII encoded. I use the procedure below But the "°" symbol is converted to "?". Do you have any idea how to save properly degree symbol?
Public Sub Write_File(ByVal txt As String, ByVal fName As String)
Try
Using OutFile As New StreamWriter(fName, False, Text.Encoding.ASCII)
OutFile.Write(txt)
End Using
Me.Write_Log("Succesfully Exported")
Catch ex As Exception
Me.Write_Log("Write Error during export")
End Try
End Sub
Encoding.ASCII is for the standard 7-bit ASCII encoding, which does not contain a degree symbol at all. In order to get a degree symbol in ASCII, you would have to use one of the many 8-bit ASCII encodings. For English, you'd probably be most interested in using the ISO 8859-1 code page, since that's the most standard-ish one there is of the bunch. For instance, instead of using Encoding.ASCII, you could do something like this:
Using OutFile As New StreamWriter(fName, False, Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1"))
OutFile.Write(txt)
End Using
For a complete list of available encodings, use the Encoding.GetEncodings method, or look at the list of supported ones in the MSDN documentation.
Of course, none of the various 8-bit ASCII encodings are compatible with each other, so, if you do use that, the degree symbol will be a completely different symbol when viewed on a system that uses a different code page by default. That is precisely why UTF-8 has become the new standard. Usage of 8-bit ASCII is widely discouraged since it is practically unworkable in multi-cultural scenarios. If you can use UTF-8 instead, I would. If you must use ASCII, it's best to stick to the standard 7-bit encoding. If you must use an 8-bit ASCII encoding, please do so sparingly and with full awareness of its drawbacks.
One more thing. You mention the degree symbol as being character 167 (0xA7) in your desired target encoding. If that is the case, you may actually be wanting IBM437 encoding rather than ISO 8859-1. IBM437 is the old code page that was used by default in MS-DOS. If you really need to use that code page, you may have additional trouble for two reasons. As you'll see in the MSDN article, that code page is not well supported in the .NET framework. In my testing, outputting the Unicode string containing the degree symbol using that encoding did not work properly. Therefore, you may find yourself needing to use a byte array to represent the data rather than a String variable (which is Unicode). For instance:
File.WriteAllBytes("Test.txt", {167})
The second problem is that IBM437 is likely not the default code page for your windows OS, so even when it is written to the file as byte value 167, it won't actually look like a degree symbol when you view it in a windows application such as notepad.

Can Fortran read bytes directly from a binary file?

I have a binary file that I would like to read with Fortran. The problem is that it was not written by Fortran, so it doesn't have the record length indicators. So the usual unformatted Fortran read won't work.
I had a thought that I could be sneaky and read the file as a formatted file, byte-by-byte (or 4 bytes by 4 bytes, really) into a character array and then convert the contents of the characters into integers and floats via the transfer function or the dreaded equivalence statement. But this doesn't work: I try to read 4 bytes at a time and, according to the POS output from the inquire statement, the read skips over like 6000 bytes or so, and the character array gets loaded with junk.
So that's a no go. Is there some detail in this approach I am forgetting? Or is there just a fundamentally different and better way to do this in Fortran? (BTW, I also tried reading into an integer*1 array and a byte array. Even though these codes would compile, when it came to the read statement, the code crashed.)
Yes.
Fortran 2003 introduced stream access into the language. Prior to this most processors supported something equivalent as an extension, perhaps called "binary" or similar.
Unformatted stream access imposes no record structure on the file. As an example, to read data from the file that corresponds to a single int in the companion C processor (if any) for a particular Fortran processor:
USE, INTRINSIC :: ISO_C_BINDING, ONLY: C_INT
INTEGER, PARAMETER :: unit = 10
CHARACTER(*), PARAMETER :: filename = 'name of your file'
INTEGER(C_INT) :: data
!***
OPEN(unit, filename, ACCESS='STREAM', FORM='UNFORMATTED')
READ (unit) data
CLOSE(unit)
PRINT "('data was ',I0)", data
You may still have issues with endianess and data type size, but those aspects are language independent.
If you are writing to a language standard prior to Fortran 2003 then unformatted direct access reading into a suitable integer variable may work - it is Fortran processor specific but works for many of the current processors.

dll files compared to gzip files

Okay, the title isn't very clear.
Given a byte array (read from a database blob) that represents EITHER the sequence of bytes contained in a .dll or the sequence of bytes representing the gzip'd version of that dll, is there a (relatively) simple signature that I can look for to differentiate between the two?
I'm trying to puzzle this out on my own, but I've discovered I can save a lot of time by asking for help. Thanks in advance.
Check if it's first two bytes are the gzip magic number 0x1f8b (see RFC 1952). Or just try to gunzip it, the operation will fail if the DLL is not gzip'd.
A gzip file should be fairly straight forward to determine as it ought to consist of a header, footer and some other distinguishable elements in between.
From Wikipedia:
"gzip" is often also used to refer to
the gzip file format, which is:
a 10-byte header, containing a magic
number, a version number and a time
stamp
optional extra headers, such as
the original file name
a body,
containing a DEFLATE-compressed
payload
an 8-byte footer, containing a
CRC-32 checksum and the length of the
original uncompressed data
You might also try determining if the gzip contains any records/entries as each will also have their own header.
You can find specific information on this file format (specifically the member header which is linked) here.

How can I add and remove bytes on from the start of a file?

I'm trying to open an existent file save a bytes in the start of it to later read them.
How can I do that? Because the "&" operand isn't working fo this type of data.
I'm using Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("text") to convert info to bytes and then add them.
Help Please.
You cannot add to or remove from the beginning of a file. It just doesn’t work. Instead, you need to read the whole file, and then write a new file with the modified data. (You can, however, replace individual bytes or chunks of bytes in a file without needing to touch the whole file.)
Secondly,
I'm using Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("text") to convert info to bytes and then add them.
You’re doing something wrong. Apparently you’ve read text data from the file and are now trying to convert it to bytes. This is the wrong way of doing it. Do not read text from the file, read the bytes directly (e.g. via My.Computer.FileSystem.ReadAllBytes). Raw byte data and text (i.e. String) are two fundamentally different concepts, do not confuse them. Do not convert needlessly to and fro.