DLL Dependencies Parser

A command line application for finding recursive DLL dependencies on an EXE or DLL as well as a way of listing which DLLs cannot be loaded or found.

Why?

When you launch an EXE or load a DLL, it might fail due to some missing DLL. Windows generally does not make debugging DLL loading failures easy. You might only receive an application error code indicating DLL load failure and no detailed report as to why and which DLL was actually missing. There are ways of listing DLL dependencies such as outlined here but the DLL Dependencies Parser can be implemented into any application easily via an external process call and it can accurately report DLL load failures. Furthermore, the application is fully statically compiled (all libraries and CRT) to only depend on KERNEL32.dll to ironically not fall victim to the problem it tries to solve:

>dumpbin /dependents DLL-Dependencies-Parser.exe
Microsoft (R) COFF/PE Dumper Version 14.28.29336.0
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.


Dump of file DLL-Dependencies-Parser.exe

File Type: EXECUTABLE IMAGE

  Image has the following dependencies:

    KERNEL32.dll

  Summary

        B000 .data
        8000 .pdata
       31000 .rdata
        2000 .reloc
        1000 .rsrc
       B2000 .text
        1000 _RDATA

Note that dumpbin is only available if you installed Visual Studio's C++ development tools so it is not suitable for distribution or reasonable to assume it is even available on the user's system.

Usage

DLL-Dependencies-Parser.exe [OPTIONS]

Options:
  -h,--help                   Print this help message and exit
  --pe-file-path TEXT:FILE REQUIRED
                              The file path to the executable to analyze
  --skip-parsing-windows-dll-dependencies
                              Whether Windows DLLs will not be parsed to speed up analysis
  --results-output-file-path TEXT
                              The output file to write the results to

Example:

>DLL-Dependencies-Parser.exe --pe-file-path D:\My-Application.exe --results-output-file-path D:\Results.json --skip-parsing-windows-dll-dependencies

Now the DLL loading report of D:\My-Application.exe is written to the D:\Results.json file and can be examined manually or programmatically.

Potential Errors

Failed parsing PE file: This error means that the input file wasn't a valid PE file. This error is returned by the pe-parse library.

Compiling

This project is a Visual Studio solution and therefore the *.sln file has to be loaded in Visual Studio. You also need a C++20 compatible MSVC compiler. Furthermore, this application depends on various libraries which need to be available on the system via a package manager like vcpkg by running the vcpkg install [package-name] command:

• CLI11
• spdlog
• pe-parse
• nlohmann-json
• Boost

Furthermore, don't forget to vcpkg integrate install with Visual Studio.

Tests

The binaries required to run the tests successfully are currently not provided.

Credits

The open source libraries above which greatly simplified the development of this tool and BullyWiiPlaza for the design and implementation.