Chapter 3. Portable Executable and Executable and Linking Formats

Introduction

In this chapter we will introduce two common binary executable formats, Portable Executable (PE) and Executable and Linkable Format (ELF). PE is the binary format used in Windows, while ELF is used by many of the Unices. ELF is a replacement for the older a.out format that did not include standardized support for shared libraries. Furthermore, PE is an offshoot of the COFF format, which was used in an earlier Unix, and the author’s understanding is that this is by and large the result ...

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