ruby-macho

A Ruby library for examining and modifying Mach-O files.

What is a Mach-O file?

The Mach-O file format is used by macOS and iOS (among others) as a general purpose binary format for object files, executables, dynamic libraries, and so forth.

Installation

ruby-macho can be installed via RubyGems:

$ gem install ruby-macho

Documentation

Full documentation is available on RubyDoc.

A quick example of what ruby-macho can do:

require 'macho'

file = MachO::MachOFile.new("/path/to/my/binary")

# get the file's type (object, dynamic lib, executable, etc)
file.filetype # => :execute

# get all load commands in the file and print their offsets:
file.load_commands.each do |lc|
  puts "#{lc.type}: offset #{lc.offset}, size: #{lc.cmdsize}"
end

# access a specific load command
lc_vers = file[:LC_VERSION_MIN_MACOSX].first
puts lc_vers.version_string # => "10.10.0"

What works?

• Reading data from x86/x86_64/PPC Mach-O files
• Changing the IDs of Mach-O and Fat dylibs
• Changing install names in Mach-O and Fat files
• Adding, deleting, and modifying rpaths.

What needs to be done?

• Unit and performance testing.

Contributing, setting up overcommit and the linters

In order to keep the repo, docs and data tidy, we use a tool called overcommit to connect up the git hooks to a set of quality checks. The fastest way to get setup is to run the following to make sure you have all the tools:

gem install overcommit bundler
bundle install
overcommit --install

Attribution

• Constants were taken from Apple, Inc's loader.h in cctools/include/mach-o. (Apple Public Source License 2.0).
• Binary files used for testing were taken from The LLVM Project. (Apache License v2.0 with LLVM Exceptions).

License

ruby-macho is licensed under the MIT License.

For the exact terms, see the license file.