I don't know what you mean by "one gets back"..

We're talking about whether the program is obfuscated or not. I said it's not, it's available intact in «block».

Because the script is NOT intact in the executable

In the binary image? Never said it was.

If you could give me a set of commands that I can run on an executable where I can "get back" the original script, I'd love to hear about it!

Step to the call to eval_pv. Print the argument.

Alternatively, change the call to eval_pv to a call a call to printf and run the program.

it is encrypted

I've head of self-extracting archives, but self-decrypting encryption? That's laughable!

This is, of course, assuming that you are using the standard definitions for words like 'encrypted' 'intact' and 'not'..

It's the third time you've used this baseless infantile attack. Move on.

ikegami,
I have spent 60 seconds reading your back and forth. I think what you are being asked to do is take the native executable after conversion and from that alone produce the original perl script. If you are saying that is trivial to do without a decompiler or running the executable through a debugger than I am interesting in understanding how. Do you have the time to take a 'hello, world' script, run it through this converter, and then show the steps you took from that point to get the original script back?

Cheers - L~R

$ perl perlc.pl a.pl -key password -exe a
Out: a.c
Exe: a

$ gdb a
...
(gdb) start
Temporary breakpoint 1 at 0x8062cc5
Starting program: /tmp/eric/b/a 

Temporary breakpoint 1, 0x08062cc5 in main ()
(gdb) disassemble
Dump of assembler code for function main:
...
0x08062df0 <main+302>:  movl   $0x1,0x4(%esp)
0x08062df8 <main+310>:  movl   $0x8167020,(%esp)
0x08062dff <main+317>:  call   0x8075b30 <Perl_eval_pv>
...
End of assembler dump.
(gdb) break *0x08062dff
Breakpoint 2 at 0x8062dff
(gdb) continue
Continuing.

Breakpoint 2, 0x08062dff in main ()
(gdb) printf "%s", 0x8167020
# Super secret!
print("Hello World\n");
[download]

Took me 6 minutes to figure out, and I've never used gdb or this assembler language.

If bleached, follow up with unbleach.pl.

Update: Oops, I have used gdb to get a backtrace of a segfaulting process. I never used any of the commands uses here, though.

If you are saying that is trivial to do without a decompiler or running the executable through a debugger

No, I'm saying it's trivial with one. The entire source code is available after stepping over two statements! It should also be simple to write an extractor.

And that's assuming the .c is not available. If you have the .c, just change the call to eval_pv to a call to printf.

Do you have the time to take a 'hello, world' script, run it through this converter, and then show the steps you took from that point to get the original script back?

Will do. Gotta run to a meeting now.