mkbino

[Description] [Features] [Usage scenarios] [Documentation] [Download] [License] [Contact]

Description

mkbino is a small utility for linking external files of any kind into an executable. This way you can embed files into your program and dont need to ship those internal files with your program. Examples of usage are linking font files or picture files into your program. This has many advantages above copying the files with the executable:

• You dont need to worry whether the files are in the right directory.
• You cannot forget to copy the files.
• Your program does not need to be able to read files from the computer, which improves security.
• You dont have to care what to do when your program does not find it files.
• The content of the files cannot be easily replaced.

Please note that the primary goal is not to hide those files from the user, but to simply bundle all files together while leaving them out of the source code.

This way you can keep external files in their original form until you are linking all together, changes to those files (for instance Documentation) can be done externally and are automatically updated at link time. Thats why mkbino is aimed to be used from scripts or Makefiles.

Features

(Or: Why not use objcopy)

• Simple invocation: "mkbino logo.png" will create a object file logo.png.o with one symbol called logo_png. Compare this to the equivalent

  objcopy -I binary -O elf32-i386 -B i386 --redefine-sym
      _binary_logo_png_start=logo_png --readonly-text logo.png logo.png.o
  

• Multiple files can be specified and will be put into one file.
• Optional creation of a header file with specified data types and containing the size of each symbol.
• Uses the C compiler to create those files for maximum portability and compability.
• Optionally creates C source for including or seperate compiling.

Possible usage scenarios

• Embedding font files into your programs. I use it for linking TrueType files into my CGI programs which create PNG file with embedded text. With embedded fonts there is no need for a CGI program to read data files from the webserver's directory, which improves security. Performance increases, too, because the font file is already in memory and can be shared among all instances of the program (those symbols are read-only).
• Embedding pictures (logos, small graphics, etc.) into your program. Replacing or exchanging images is easier compared to direct coding into the source file.
• Include documentation into your executable. You can embed the current version of the README file into your program, which leaves you with only one source for documentation, there is no need to sync the documents in the source files with those in the programs directory.

Documentation

See the Documentation for detailed options and examples.

Download

The program is available as (UNIX-like) source code only. Does not compile yet under MS-Windows. For details see the README file within the archive.

Current version: mkbino 0.2.0(13 KB)

License and Copyright

Contact

If you have any comments, bug reports, extensions, suggestions or whatever, mail me (André Przywara):
osp (at) andrep.de