Introduction

This is binstats 1.08 - an administration utility for tracking down the various types of binary formats for Linux executables and their dynamic library dependencies and also executable scripts and man pages.

Features include:

  1. tally of a.out (Linux/i386), ELF and ECOFF (new!) binaries, dynamically and statically linked, and unstripped and setuid binaries
  2. tally of Java bytecode binaries (if you run file-3.20+)
  3. tally of text files distinguishing between Bourne, bash and [T]C shells, awk, perl, python & tcl scripts, other interpreted scripts & unidentified texts
  4. tally of duplicated executable names
  5. tally of binaries with missing dynamic libraries
  6. tally of man pages and duplicated manual names (new!)
  7. tally of DLL and ELF dynamic libraries, used and unused
  8. log of all the above tallies plus listing a.out binaries, statically linked binaries, unstripped binaries, setuid binaries, duplicated executables, missing library binaries, all used and unused dynamic libraries.
  9. a C program that dereferences symbolic links
  10. a command line interface
It is inspired by execount written by Murple, murple at clark.net. Originally, when binstats was created in 1996 it was useful during the a.out to ELF transition for pruning a system of a.out executables.

Now in 2001, times have changed with fancy package management systems being common on Linux distributions. This makes binstats much less needed. But the hurdle of creating binary packages suffices that people still compile stuff from tar balls of source code - I know I do. Of course, with the ravages of time, after many compilations and installations your system gets into a rather untidy state: forgotten binaries that once used libc5 populated /usr/local/bin; multiple versions of dynamically linked libraries lie forlorn; various man pages are scattered across your file hierarchy. All because you were enjoying the vicarious pleasure of trying the latest and greatest version of rapidly changing open sources. Thus binstats is a last resort to restore order to the chaos that this ad-hoc approach to software installation brings.

Go on, try it. You know you want to: it's the latest version...

This latest release fixes some bugs and adds some features that include OMAGIC and ECOFF support and man page checking.

You can get binstats-1.08 (12436 bytes) here or version 1.07 at metalab (was sunsite) (after it has been moved from Incoming). The old versions are still available: binstats-0.91 (3665 bytes), binstats-0.93 (4451 bytes), binstats-0.95 (8172 bytes), binstats-0.96 (9505 bytes), binstats-1.00 (10437 bytes), binstats-1.01 (10544 bytes), binstats-1.03 (11808 bytes), binstats-1.04 (11881 bytes), binstats-1.05 (11963 bytes), binstats-1.06 (12303 bytes) and binstats-1.07 (12340 bytes).

Updated on 18th January 2001

Created on 26th July 1996

Peter Chang: peter.chang at nottingham.ac.uk