insomnimus / cmdc

Compile a command line into a Windows executable!

CMDC - Command Compiler

This program saves a command along with its arguments into a 32 or 64-bit PE executable (Windows only).

It receives the command and an output file, writes the serialized command into a pre-determined location in an executable template and saves the modified template into the output file.

For that, the executable template needs to be compiled first; for full control and minimal size, the template is written in assembly.

But this is what a shell script should do! Why did you write this?!

No particular reason, take it or leave it :^).

There is actually one use case that I know of, though: cargo style subcommand plugins sometimes need .exe extensions. So instead of writing a small program that basically calls a shell script with an interpreter, you can use cmdc to do it for you.

Install

Grab a pre-built binary from the releases page (here's the latest release).

Or build from source:

Building

Since the templates are written in assembly and make use of macros provided by flat-assembler, you must have the fasm.exe installed on your system. You will also need a recent enough version of rust (tested with 1.73.0).

1. Install flat-assembler from here or optionally from scoop.
2. If flat-assembler's INCLUDE directory is not in your $INCLUDE env variable, put it there. Or optionally set the FASM_INCLUDE env variable to the directory.
3. If fasm.exe is not in $PATH, set the FASM environment variable to the full path where fasm.exe is located; e.g D:\fasm\fasm.exe.
4. Build like the usual: cargo build --release. The build script will take care of assembling the assembly files.

Usage

Provide a command, an output file and optional arguments. You can optionally specify a different arch than the one the program was compiled on with --arch=x32|x64.

# cmd style ls
cmdc -o dir.exe -- cmd.exe /c dir
# Inspect the generated executable:
cmdc -i dir.exe
# prints: "cmd.exe" /c dir
# ls using wsl
# note that wsl.exe only works on 64 bit
cmdc -a x64 -o ls.exe -- wsl.exe ls
# Inspect the executable:
cmdc --inspect ls.exe
# prints: "wsl.exe" ls