On Sun, Sep 01, 2002 at 10:26:10PM +0000, dirty boy wrote:

> im learning about the ELF specification with a friend of mine, were hoping 
> to get a better understanding of how these things work, and a wild idea 
> occurred to us - would it be possible to create a valid ELF executable from 
> purely printable ASCII characters ?
> 
> by that i mean, you would be able to literally cat > a.out and enter your 
> executable from the keyboard! it wouldnt have todo anything, just return 
> 0...
> 
> the file wouldnt have to be portable, only the fields that the kernel is 
> going to notice would have to be present, so long as it executes!
> 
> im convinced the answer is no - but my friend says it is, he says hes seen 
> it done in PE format ( although we cant find it on the web ) and therefore 
> theres no reason why it couldnt be done in ELF.

There answer is no; the ELF magic at the begin of an ELF file contains
a non-printable character.

  Ralf
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