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NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

nirsoft.net

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Re: NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

#21

Post by swiley »

Const-me wrote: post #7
Retr0spectrum wrote: post #4

I love these tools, but my one "complaint" is that they're not open source. I often find myself searching "how to find X in Windows", and the answer is to run one of these tools. But what I really want to know is how the tool does it.

Why would you want source code for that? WinAPI is visible in dependency viewers. File system operations visible in process monitor. Same with registry access. WMI queries are visible in event viewer (simple setup is required). Network activity is visible in sniffers. Even when source code is available, these tools are both easier to use (reading source code can be very time consuming for large projects), and they gi…

I was under the impression that most of these are small utilities.

I've learned more about posix and the GNU API reading the source code to busybox utilities (which is super easy because they're so somall) than just about anywhere else.

Re: NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

#22

Post by papermachete »

Const-me wrote: post #7
Retr0spectrum wrote: post #4

I love these tools, but my one "complaint" is that they're not open source. I often find myself searching "how to find X in Windows", and the answer is to run one of these tools. But what I really want to know is how the tool does it.

Why would you want source code for that? WinAPI is visible in dependency viewers. File system operations visible in process monitor. Same with registry access. WMI queries are visible in event viewer (simple setup is required). Network activity is visible in sniffers. Even when source code is available, these tools are both easier to use (reading source code can be very time consuming for large projects), and they gi…

I don't understand the thesis - releasing the source code costs nothing and the user can choose whether to look at it or not. They could've spent the time apologising for virus ""false alarms"" publishing the code instead. That way one can trivially look through it instead of wasting time on different analyzers.

Re: NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

#24

Post by userbinator »

Retr0spectrum wrote: post #4

I love these tools, but my one "complaint" is that they're not open source. I often find myself searching "how to find X in Windows", and the answer is to run one of these tools. But what I really want to know is how the tool does it.

Add the term "Win32" to your search results and you'll probably get something more relevant.

Re: NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

#25

Post by myself248 »

Every time I see this posted somewhere, I'm delighted to have sent Nir Sofer a few bucks through his Donate page.

I haven't actually used these tools in years -- I'm mostly off the Windows bandwagon now -- but back when I was referring to them constantly, it was wonderful to be able to say "thanks" for all the time he saved me.

Re: NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

#26

Post by josteink »

weinzierl wrote: post #5

I used these for years. Especially the Windows handles checker I found incredibly useful. That being said: When I recently recommended it to a friend he complained about virus scanner warnings. When we ran the tool through Virus Total we had a considerable amount of warnings and these were not only from the heuristic checkers. I have considerable trust in Nirsoft and maybe these warnings are wrong but on the other ha…

> When we ran the tool through Virus Total we had a considerable amount of warnings and these were not only from the heuristic checkers.

To be fair most anti-virus has a massive false-positive rate.

I’ve had my own software, built from clean source with no fishy dependencies, flagged for whatever reason.

My trust in AV-tech is about zero.

Re: NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

#27

Post by Const-me »

papermachete wrote: post #22
Const-me wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want source code for that? WinAPI is visible in dependency viewers. File system operations visible in process monitor. Same with registry access. WMI queries are visible in event viewer (simple setup is required). Network activity is visible in sniffers. Even when source code is available, these tools are both easier to use (reading source code can be very time consuming for large projects), and they gi…

I don't understand the thesis - releasing the source code costs nothing and the user can choose whether to look at it or not. They could've spent the time apologising for virus ""false alarms"" publishing the code instead. That way one can trivially look through it instead of wasting time on different analyzers.

> releasing the source code costs nothing

When you release code, you need to do following.

1. Ensure it builds. Old software can only be built with old compilers, with old Windows SDK. Sometimes they also rely on old custom build tools. Other times builds requires manual steps.

2. Ensure you have not violated any copyrights or patents. The relevant laws are ridiculous these days, potentially, you can get in legal trouble even by copy-pasting stuff from stackoverflow.

3. Ideally, that it comes with documentation/comments, at least minimal.

Neither of these are free, they’re quite time consuming. Speaking from experience, I did release a few things, e.g. https://github.com/Const-me/EsentSerialize/

> That way one can trivially look through it

Looking through is not enough. To be sure, you need to build the software and run the binaries you’ve built. Building third-party code, especially old one, can be very hard: dependencies, build environment, mismatched OS versions, and thousand more papercuts. I sometimes spending a whole day just to build some third-party project that I need to use. BTW I’ve been programming for living for couple decades now.

Even if it builds, security audit of a program longer than a couple pages of code is very non-trivial. If you’ll ask “how do you know they are longer than a couple pages?” the answer is “because GUI”. Despite user friendly, GUI usually require substantial amount of code. That’s probably the main reason why open source community is reluctant to create GUI apps despite users obviously prefer them over CLI.

Re: NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

#28

Post by jimjimjim »

userbinator wrote: post #24
Retr0spectrum wrote: post #4

I love these tools, but my one "complaint" is that they're not open source. I often find myself searching "how to find X in Windows", and the answer is to run one of these tools. But what I really want to know is how the tool does it.

Add the term "Win32" to your search results and you'll probably get something more relevant.

Yes! Win32 is the most useful google filter when programming in windows.

Re: NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

#30

Post by Const-me »

swiley wrote: post #21
Const-me wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want source code for that? WinAPI is visible in dependency viewers. File system operations visible in process monitor. Same with registry access. WMI queries are visible in event viewer (simple setup is required). Network activity is visible in sniffers. Even when source code is available, these tools are both easier to use (reading source code can be very time consuming for large projects), and they gi…

I was under the impression that most of these are small utilities. I've learned more about posix and the GNU API reading the source code to busybox utilities (which is super easy because they're so somall) than just about anywhere else.

> about posix and the GNU API reading the source code

Windows has huge API surface. If you really want to learn it, I suggest reading books, not source code. E.g. “Windows internals” is descent one.

If you’re just interested how particular program works, with the tools that I’ve mentioned in the above comment, you’ll find more about the API than looking at the source code. Especially if you’re just learning. Many apps use big libraries like MFC or QT, the source code will tell you how the developer called these libraries, but the tools will tell you how the process interacts with OS. Due to the complexity of the libraries, can be huge differences between the two.

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