I've got a bunch of .o files for a project, and I'd like to check them out to understand what's required from me. However, whenever I try to open them in CLion, I just see a bunch of jumbled symbols. What tool can I use to view these files in hex format instead?
2 Answers
.o files are compiled from .c source files, usually by compilers like gcc or msvc. The symbols you're seeing are due to the binary format of the files. If you want to see a clearer representation, try using HXD—it’s a hex editor that displays the data in a more readable format. Just a heads up, these .o files need to be linked by a program (linker) to create an executable (like .exe for Windows or an ELF file for Linux). They might also be meant for use as libraries (.dll or .lib), depending on your project.
CLion isn't really designed for this kind of work since it's more focused on C development. If you want to dig deeper, you might want to use tools like objectdump to view the assembly code or Ghidra (among other options) to analyze the call graph. Just so you know, you'll need to get acquainted with the basics of reverse engineering to extract useful information from these tools. Feature functions can possibly be obtained with objtool or Ghidra, but you'll have to create header files if you want to call them in your C code.
I'm actually working on a simplified version of a linker, but I want to check out the hex code first to figure out how my linker should work.