>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Kevin D. Clark) >Unless you work for a goverment agency with a three-letter >acronym, this process ought to settle any doubts that you >have about this executable.
a) as far as I know I do not work for any three-letter government agency (except perhaps the IRS :-( ). b) three-letter agency security is the level of assurance desired. c) some people might be concerned about the possibility of TLAs being in the game, and not necessarily on the right side... I'll send a separate message with the problem description, in part to justify statement c, and in hope that maybe other approaches can be suggested. >... > >Think about what you're asking for [...] I did, and your PERL multi-liner might be the way to solve it. >I'd suggest running your executable image through a >code-coverage tool [...] Then, >run your executable image through a debugger with memory >watchpoints set [...] The approach I thought of is based on doing exactly that, in an emulator or virtual machine environment, single stepping automagically through the debugger until a conditional transfer of control is recognized. At that point a snapshot would be taken, the natural branch followed, iterating until complete. Then revert to the last snapshot, force the alternative branch, repeat until done. What's the big deal? Seems like it could probably all be wrapped into a PERL one-liner at the top level, even if the one-liner has to expand into some more complex subfunctions down the tree. All right, I concede I am not considering potential data dependencies (e.g. if this leg of the branch is taken some data item(s) must be this value not that), which could affect array indexing for example. I'll accept that limitation for the present, because this will not be used in isolation. Heck, with all the work that's been done on stuff like natural language heuristics it seems the ability to figure out the data dependencies should be within the state of the art too, but that is certainly a harder problem. Comments? Thanks for the responses so far, and TIA for any to come! -lbm _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss