Shell Script Compiler

A generic shell script compiler. Shc takes a script, which is specified on the command line and produces C source code. The generated source code is then compiled and linked to produce a stripped binary executable.

The compiled binary will still be dependent on the shell specified in the first line of the shell code (i.e shebang) (i.e. #!/bin/sh), thus shc does not create completely independent binaries.

shc itself is not a compiler such as cc, it rather encodes and encrypts a shell script and generates C source code with the added expiration capability. It then uses the system compiler to compile a stripped binary which behaves exactly like the original script. Upon execution, the compiled binary will decrypt and execute the code with the shell -c option.

Install

1. ./configure
2. make
3. sudo make install

Note If make fails due to automake version, run ./autogen.sh before running the above commands.

Ubuntu-specific

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:neurobin/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install shc

If the above installation method seems like too much work, then just download a compiled binary package from release page and copy the shc binary to /usr/bin and shc.1 file to /usr/share/man/man1.

Usage

shc [options]
shc -f script.sh -o binary
shc -U -f script.sh -o binary # Untraceable binary (prevent strace, ptrace etc..)

Testing

1. cd to test directory: cd test
2. Try: shc -f test.bash -o test, where test.bash is the bash source.
3. output binary file will be test. If no output file is specified by the -o option, then it will create an executable with .x extension by default.

Known bugs

The one (and I hope the only) limitation using shc is the _SC_ARG_MAX system configuration parameter. It limits the maximum length of the arguments to the exec function, limiting the maximum length of the runnable script of shc.

!! - CHECK YOUR RESULTS CAREFULLY BEFORE USING - !!

Man Page

WebPage