UPX – Ultimate Packer for Executables

Post by justinfrankel » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 8:24 PM UTC

slezyr wrote: post #18

steeve wrote: post #15

UPX still works great when used with Go executables. We use it heavily to compress some of our Docker image executables [1]. [1] https://github.com/znly/docker-protobuf/blob/master/Dockerfi...

It should work on almost every binary. The exception are NSIS installers, self-extracting archives (exe rar files), files with IDL interfaces. When NSIS starts they will try to open it's own exe file and find the section in which it's packed data is stored. But UPX will remove those sections and create .UPX section with compressed data.

Post by bruno2223 » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 8:30 PM UTC

slezyr wrote: post #20

bruno2223 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno know. But this method worked for years!

See my update. You could only stop kids, who tried to use UPX unpackers.

Post by kronos29296 » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 9:00 PM UTC

slezyr wrote: post #22

justinfrankel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually set NSIS to UPX-pack its stub, if you're so inclined, but the stub is pretty small already.

This isn't what I meant. If you try to run UPX on someones NSIS installer the resulting file will fail to launch.

Post by kronos29296 » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 9:03 PM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #11

I used to use this a lot, back in the bad old days, when drive space was at a premium. These days I struggle to fill my hard drives no matter how wasteful I am with downloading videos and not bothering to clean up afterwards... and the amount of hard drive space you can buy per dollar keeps growing faster than I can fill my disks. Much trickier issues to tackle are speed (unless you go with SSD's, but then you run in…

Post by DaiPlusPlus » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 9:38 PM UTC

kronos29296 wrote: post #27

pmoriarty wrote: post #11

I used to use this a lot, back in the bad old days, when drive space was at a premium. These days I struggle to fill my hard drives no matter how wasteful I am with downloading videos and not bothering to clean up afterwards... and the amount of hard drive space you can buy per dollar keeps growing faster than I can fill my disks. Much trickier issues to tackle are speed (unless you go with SSD's, but then you run in…

I think upx is more useful for static binaries like that of Haskell applications which is kinda huge. (GHC produces huge binaries - eg. pandoc or ghc-mod). A 100 something mb binary is not what you usually have. UPX can work its magic stuff like that. More manageable not necessarily essential but when you need it you need it badly.