Linux – How to decompile a ELF 32-bit LSB executable

Try:

ldd executable

For example:

[me@somebox ~]$ ldd /bin/ls
        linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xb7f57000)
        librt.so.1 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/librt.so.1 (0xb7f4c000)
        libselinux.so.1 => /lib/libselinux.so.1 (0xb7f32000)
        libacl.so.1 => /lib/libacl.so.1 (0xb7f2b000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0xb7ddc000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libpthread.so.0 (0xb7dc4000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7f58000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libdl.so.2 (0xb7dc0000)
        libattr.so.1 => /lib/libattr.so.1 (0xb7dbb000)
[me@somebox ~]$ 

Note that this will only report shared libraries. If you need to find out what static libraries were linked in at compile time, that's a bit trickier, especially seeing as your executable is 'stripped' (no debugging symbols).

The file you're trying to execute (…/lmutil) exists but its “loader” doesn't exist, where

• the loader of a native executable is its dynamic loader, for example /lib/ld-linux.so.2;
• the loader of a script is the program mentioned on its shebang line, e.g., /bin/sh if the script begins with #!/bin/sh.

From the name of the directory, there's a good chance that lmutil is an amd64 Linux binary, looking for /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 as its loader, but you have an amd64 Linux kernel running a 386 (i.e. 32-bit) userland. You need to get suitable binaries for your platform.

I consider this situation to be Unix's most misleading error message. Unfortunately fixing it would be hard: the kernel can only report a numeric error code to the caller of the program, so it only has room for “command not found” (ENOENT) and not for the name of the loader it's looking for. This is one of these rare cases where strace doesn't help.