This library is for reading ELF files using the Go programming language. Go's standard library already includes ELF-related functions, but these do not include some useful functionality for displaying or accessing some aspects of ELF files out-of-the-box.

This library supports both big and little-endian 32- and 64-bit ELF files. You can specifically read 32-bit files by calling ParseELF32File(...), or 64-bit files by ParseELF64File(...), or either type of file using ParseELFFile(...). If you use the generic ParseELFFile(...) function, then you can either use the returned ELFFile interface directly, or use type assertions to retrieve a 32-bit *ELF32File or a 64-bit *ELF64File.

The following example shows how this library can be used to output section names to standard output. For a more complete example of how to read information from an ELF file, see the command-line tool at elf_view/elf_view.go.

import (
	"fmt"
	"github.com/yalue/elf_reader"
	"os"
)

func main() {
	// Print the section names in /bin/bash. This code will work on both 32-bit
	// and 64-bit systems.
	raw, e := os.ReadFile("/bin/bash")
	if e != nil {
		fmt.Printf("Failed reading /bin/bash: %s\n", e)
		return
	}
	elf, e := elf_reader.ParseELFFile(raw)
	if e != nil {
		fmt.Printf("Failed parsing ELF file: %s\n", e)
		return
	}
	count := elf.GetSectionCount()
	for i := uint16(0); i < count; i++ {
		if i == 0 {
			fmt.Printf("Section 0: NULL section (no name)\n")
			continue
		}
		name, e := elf.GetSectionName(uint16(i))
		if e != nil {
			fmt.Printf("Failed getting section %d name: %s\n", i, e)
			continue
		}
		fmt.Printf("Section %d name: %s\n", i, name)
	}
}