Can exe file converted into source code?

Question

Please help me to find whether there is any software for converting exe files to programming code or source code. Also tell me about disassembler and decompiler. Or it is some other way to convert exe to source code.

Answer 1

Okay, there are a couple of issues here. First, copyright/IP/etc. law is something people should be cynical about. Here in the US some rich lawyers and even legislators are making claims the people who passed the laws decades ago -- from both parties -- claimed should NEVER be made. In particular there is something called fair use. For your own education and study it should NOT be a crime to study professional work. To make a profitable competitor it should be something they can take legal action on -- a tort -- if you are using their work unfairly. There are literally people who are saying "there is no such thing as fair use" and they are trying to exterminate it everywhere. So there IS nothing wrong -- morally -- with doing this and in many places it is still quite legal.



What it is not, exactly, is doable. To compile something is to make things smaller.. When an exe file is compiled some things are stripped out: some comments, In particular, most compilers offer access to an assembler, or to link to already assembled object files, and many commercial programs use routines written in different languages. Once it is compiled and linked there is no reliable way to tell how what was written without internal documentation because this is precisely information likely to be stripped out.



What you can do is translate the machine code into assembly mnemnonics and figure out how the program functions. You use a debugger for this. There are a lot of them out there, and there are a lot of tutorials for using them, but these are not source code. The only way to really look at source code is to have it given to you. And if you purchased the software this is fair use.

Answer 2

Apart of the question if what you ask is legal, you will have to know the programming language the exe was made in. For example a .Net application is quite easy to decompile. A C application, I don't really know but with an application written in assembler it is simply not possible to decompile.

Answer 3

Yes it is possible to decompile code. It is some times refered to as reverse engineering. Also the decompiled code is not always a perfect match for the original

Answer 4

You can't obtain the original source code as written by the authors, but you can easily disassemble and then reverse compile from machine code into a C/C++ version of the assembler code. Don't expect it to be super readable though as for one thing, all comments are typically stripped out of the code upon compilation and it's possible you'll get a mix of assembly and higher level C/C++ as your output unless the decompiler is based on the same version of the compiler used to originally compile the code.

Answer 5

This is possible, but is illegal in most cases, so you would find info on hacking networks etc.