How can I find out if an EXE has Command-Line Options

Question

Suppose you have an  EXE and you want to check if it has Command-Line Options  How can one know if the  EXE has this ability  In my case I know that Nir Sofers WebBrowserPassView exe has the ability to start it via cmd exe and WebBrowserPassView exe  stext output txt  But how can I find out if I don t know

User · Answer

Sysinternals has another tool you could use  Strings exe  Example   strings exe c  windows system32 wuauclt exe  gt   temp  wuauclt strings txt  amp  amp   temp  wuauclt strings txt

User · Answer

The easiest way would be to use use ProcessExplorer but it would still require some searching   Make sure your exe is running and open ProcessExplorer  In ProcessExplorer find the name of your binary file and double click it to show properties  Click the Strings tab  Search down the list of string found in the binary file  Most strings will be garbage so they can be ignored  Search for anything that might possibly resemble a command line switch  Test this switch from the command line and see if it does anything   Note that it might be your binary simply has no command line switches   For reference here is the above steps applied to the Chrome executable  The command line switches accepted by Chrome can be seen in the list

User · Answer

Just use IDA PRO  https   www hex-rays com products ida index shtml  to disassemble the file  and search for some known command line option  using Search   Text  - in that section you will then typically see all the command line options - for the program  LIB2NIST exe  in the screenshot below  for example  it shows a documented command line option   COM2TAG  but also some undocumented ones  like  L  Hope this helps

User · Answer

Unless the writer of the executable has specifically provided a way for you to display a list of all the command line switches that it offers  then there is no way of doing this   As Marcin suggests  the typical switches for displaying all of the options are either    or  help  some applications might prefer the Unix-style syntax  -  and -help  respectively   But those are just a common convention   If those don t work  you re out of luck  You ll need to check the documentation for the application  or perhaps try decompiling the executable  if you know what you re looking for

User · Answer

Really this is an extension to Marcin s answer    But you could also try passing  rubbish  arguments to see if you get any errors back  Getting any response from the executable directly in the shell will mean that it is likely looking at the arguments you re passing  with an error response being close to a guarantee that it is    Failing that you might have to directly ask the publishers creators owners    sniffing the binaries yourself just seems like far too much work for an end-user

User · Answer

Invoke it from the shell  with an argument like    or --help  Those are the usual help switches

User · Answer

This is what I get from console on Windows 10  C   gt find    Searches for a text string in a file or files   FIND   V    C    N    I    OFF LINE    quot string quot    drive   path filename            V         Displays all lines NOT containing the specified string     C         Displays only the count of lines containing the string     N         Displays line numbers with the displayed lines     I         Ignores the case of characters when searching for the string     OFF LINE  Do not skip files with offline attribute set     quot string quot    Specifies the text string to find     drive   path filename              Specifies a file or files to search   If a path is not specified  FIND searches the text typed at the prompt or piped from another command

[command-line] How can I find out if an .EXE has Command-Line Options?

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