Re: [PLUG] Useful distro-specific utilities that shouldn't be distro-specific

[David Colon <dcolon@dcolon.org>]

On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 4:30 PM, Eric at Lucii.org <eric@lucii.org> wrote:

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On 04/09/2013 04:01 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> I was just following gentoo-dev and noticed a mention of a useful utility called lddtree which offers friendlier output formats than ldd and a few more options (useful for scripting).  It is provided by a package called pax-utils, and looking at some of the other programs in this package like scanelf and dumpelf it struck me that this is really something that isn't distro-specific and which would be useful elsewhere.
>
> We also have debian-utils which obviously came from Debian, and includes utilities like run-parts and and tempfile.
>
> That got me thinking - how many scripts/tools/etc are floating around in distro-specific packages that really are things that would be useful to know about in case people want to grab them and use them for their own purposes on their own distros.  You don't have to run Gentoo to benefit from a generic ELF parser.
>
> If anybody has similar tools they'd like to toss out in this thread I'd be interested in hearing about them.  Who knows - this might even be a good topic for a meeting...
>
> Rich

+1  ...Great idea.

I wonder if some could be ported to other distros?  I'd like to see those
you mention ported to Ubuntu.

pax-utils is available in Debian and Ubuntu.

root@droplet:/home/dcolon# lsb_release -a

No LSB modules are available.

Distributor ID: Debian

Description:    Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.7 (squeeze)

Release:        6.0.7

Codename:       squeeze

root@droplet:/home/dcolon# aptitude show pax-utils

Package: pax-utils                       

State: not installed

Version: 0.1.16-2

Priority: extra

Section: misc

Maintainer: R??mi Denis-Courmont <rdenis@simphalempin.com>

Uncompressed Size: 197 k

Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7-1), libcap2 (>= 2.11)

Suggests: chpax

Description: Security-focused ELF files checking tool

 This is a small set of various PaX aware and related utilities for ELF binaries. It can check

 ELF binary files and running processes for issues that might be relevant when using ELF

 binaries along with PaX, such as non-PIC code or executable stack and heap.

Homepage: http://dev.gentoo.org/~solar/pax-utils/

David

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