how to run window .exe files in FC1!

John Thompson JohnThompson at new.rr.com
Sun Oct 10 05:03:31 UTC 2004


Mike Noble wrote:

> Angela Kahealani wrote:
>> I understand the nonexecutability of WinDblOwS .exe's on Linux, but
>> I have a related question: some folks distribute (e.g. on the WWW),
>> downloadable "stuff" which is theoretically NOT an WinDblOwS executable,
>> but instead some kind of compressed archive, which nevertheless has an 
>> .exe extension, which I presume means that it is a self-extracting 
>> archive IFF you have WinDblOwS to execute it on... and the question is:
>> is there any way to retrieve the contents running Linux, i.e. is there 
>> a Linux program that knows how to extract the archive's contents, 
>> ignoring the self-extracting wrapper?

> You can learn about the file type by the following command:
> 
> file file.exe
> 
> file will tell you what it can about the file.

Unfortunately, if you run file against a self-extracting Win archive, 
all it will tell you is " MS-DOS executable (EXE), OS/2 or MS Windows"

But if you run "unzip -t" against it, it will show as a valid zip archive:

[john at starfleet incoming]$ file unz551xN.exe
unz551xN.exe: MS-DOS executable (EXE), OS/2 or MS Windows
[john at starfleet incoming]$ unzip -t unz551xN.exe
Archive:  unz551xN.exe
Info-ZIP's portable UnZip, version 5.51, Windows 9x/NT/2K/etc. exes and 
docs.
   For latest information about Zip and UnZip, check out our spiffy web 
sites at
     http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/
     http://ftp.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/
   and our principal ftp distribution sites at
     ftp://ftp.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/  (sources and binaries)
     ftp://ftp.icce.rug.nl/infozip/       (encrypting binaries only).
   You betcha.
     testing: README                   OK
     testing: LICENSE                  OK
     testing: COPYING.OLD              OK
     testing: WHERE                    OK
     testing: unzip.txt                OK
     testing: unzipsfx.txt             OK
     testing: funzip.txt               OK
     testing: zipinfo.txt              OK
     testing: ziplimit.txt             OK
     testing: README.NT                OK
     testing: unzip.exe                OK
     testing: funzip.exe               OK
     testing: unzipsfx.exe             OK
     testing: SFXWiz32.exe             OK
     testing: unzipsfx-gcc.exe         OK
     testing: SFXWiz32-gcc.exe         OK
No errors detected in compressed data of unz551xN.exe.

That's because file only looks for a few "magic" bytes in the file 
header, and once it finds a match, that's the type of file it tells you. 
  E.g. for ZIP archives:

# ZIP archives (Greg Roelofs, c/o zip-bugs at wkuvx1.wku.edu)
0       string          PK\003\004      Zip archive data
 >4      byte            0x09            \b, at least v0.9 to extract
 >4      byte            0x0a            \b, at least v1.0 to extract
 >4      byte            0x0b            \b, at least v1.1 to extract
 >4      byte            0x14            \b, at least v2.0 to extract

and for DOS executables:

0       string  MZ              MS-DOS executable (EXE)





-- 

-John (john at os2.dhs.org)




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