Running NANA on Linux

Neil Corlett’s NANA is still the best tool around for finding graphical data in a binary. Unfortunately, it’s DOS only.

If you’ve been around my site, you’ll see I’ve written a loader for using NANA on Windows via DOSBox. That code, however, relied on Windows “DIR” for detecting the DOS8.3 name of the file to ‘nana’.

I tweaked the code to work on Linux with Linux DOSBox.

Assuming you’ve compiled DOSBox and have installed PHP, do the following.

First off, download NANA and unzip it so you have NANA.EXE. Then,

sudo mkdir /usr/local/win32 sudo mkdir /usr/local/win32/programs sudo mv nana.exe /usr/local/win32/programs sudo vi /usr/local/win32/nana

Now paste in the following code block:

#!/bin/sh TEMP="/tmp" WIN32="/usr/local/win32" echo echo NANA Loader for Linux echo By Derrick Sobodash echo if [ "$#" -gt "0" ]; then echo Viewing $1 via DOSBox … echo #if [ ${1:0:1} eq "/" ] if [ ${1%"${1#?}"} = "/" ]; then ln -s $1 $TEMP/nana else ln -s $PWD/$1 $TEMP/nana fi dosbox -noconsole -c “mount D $WIN32/programs/nana” -c “mount C $TEMP” - c “D:\\nana.exe C:\\nana” rm $TEMP/nana echo Program terminated. echo else echo You must specify a file to view! echo fi

Save the file, then chmod it 755. You can create a globally accessible link to it with:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/win32/nana /usr/local/bin/nana

Now whenever you type “nana filename” at the command prompt, NANA will open via DOSBox and let you view your file. It’s quite fast too, assuming you use the DOSBox dynamic recompilation engine.

When you exit NANA, the temporary symlink is destroyed.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.