A generic shell script compiler. Shc takes a script, which is
specified on the command line and produces C source code. The
generated source code is then compiled and linked to produce a
stripped binary executable. Use with care.
shc creates a stripped binary executable version of the script specified with -f on the command line.
The binary version will get a .x extension appended and will usually be a bit larger in size than the original ascii code. Generated C source code is saved in a file with the extension .x.c
If you supply an expiration date with the -e option the compiled binary will refuse to run after the date specified. The message "Please contact your provider" will be displayed instead. This message can be changed with the -m option.
You can compile any kind of shell script, but you need to supply valid -i, -x and -l options.
The compiled binary will still be dependent on the shell specified in the first line of the shell code (i.e. #!/bin/sh), thus shc does not create completely independent binaries.
shc itself is not a compiler such as cc, it rather encodes and encrypts a shell script and generates C source code with the added expiration capability. It then uses the system compiler to compile a stripped binary which behaves exactly like the original script. Upon execution, the compiled binary will decrypt and execute the code with the shell -c option. Unfortunatelly, it will not give you any speed improvement as a real C program would.
shc's main purpose is to protect your shell scripts from modification or inspection. You can use it if you wish to distribute your scripts but don't want them to be easily readable by other people.
3.8.9
See CHANGES file
Install required packages for SHC compiler. For Debian/Ubuntu
''' $ apt-get install libc6-dev '''
For RHEL/CentOS
''' $ yum install glibc-devel '''
Download the latest source code of SHC compiler Now compile the SHC source code on your system and install it using following command.
''' $ cd shc-3.8.9 $ make $ make install '''
Use following command to create binary file of your script.sh
''' $ shc -T -f script.sh '''
The command line options are:
-e date Expiration date in dd/mm/yyyy format [none] -m message message to display upon expiration ["Please contact your provider"] -f script_name File name of the script to compile -i inline_option Inline option for the shell interpreter i.e: -e -x comand eXec command, as a printf format i.e: exec(\'%s\',@ARGV); -l last_option Last shell option i.e: -- -r Relax security. Make a redistributable binary which executes on different systems running the same operating system. -v Verbose compilation -D Switch on debug exec calls -T Allow binary to be traceable (using strace, ptrace, truss, etc.) -C Display license and exit -A Display abstract and exit -h Display help and exit
Caveat emptor: see Copyright
The results look fine to me, but I havn't used this in anger, but
the author has used shc for his work widely over SunOS, Solaris and
Linux, and done some testing on Irix and HPUX.
We tested it on a few SMALL ksh scripts - big tasks should probably
be written in C in the first place (see _SC_ARG_MAX below)!
The one (and I hope the only) limitation using shc is the
_SC_ARG_MAX system configuration parameter.
It limits the maximum length of the arguments to the exec function,
limiting the maximum length of the runnable script of shc.
!! - CHECK YOUR RESULTS CAREFULLY BEFORE USING - !!
Author: Francisco Rosales Garcia http://www.datsi.fi.upm.es/~frosal
GPL v2