I need to modify a script but it's full of gibberish

Question

I need to modify a script which is part of a programme I downloaded. However, when I try to view the script with vim, it is full of symbols, numbers and letters placed randomly. Is there anything I can do to read this script? This is part of the script:

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Answer 1

The "script" is not actually a script at all, but a compiled executable binary file. This is evident from the fact that it's not a text file and that it contains an ELF header.

This means that to change it, you would have to locate its source code (which may not be available on your machine, and in some cases it may not available publicly at all), change it, and recompile the binary executable.

How you do this depends on where you got the program from, what programming language its source is written in (probably Fortran using MPI judging from the library names and paths present in the binary output), and what build system it uses to build.

This may require installing one or several additional pieces of software on your system for rebuilding the executable, along with any dependencies (libraries and headers) that the source may be using.

Answer 2

If you don't have the original source code and you are desperate, you can also decompile (reverse engineer) the executable file. It will give you something like assembler or c-code, maybe even fortran.

But you won't get the original source code from it, just some basic code with simple instructions, which compiles into the same binary as the original code.

Might need lots of research to understand it and fix what you want to change. With a lot of refactoring, renaming and extracting functions, you could even get a usuable source code for future development or porting to another platform.

convert executable back to C source code