Compiling a bash/shell script to binary

If we want to obfuscate what the script is doing we can compile it to binary using shc. As this is often not installed, we can add it using brew on mac or apt-get for Debian based Linux systems. Alternatively, we can install it from here (the github repository) and running make .

Start with your bash script

#!/bin/bashecho "How are you $1?"

Building the compiled script

To build the files we can run

shc -f scriptname.sh

This creates a scriptname.sh.x which is our compiled executable and scriptname.sh.x.c which is the c transpiled file that this is created from.

We can now rename our file to something along the lines of

mv scriptname.sh.x scriptname

Note: If we get some errors, these can often be ignored if the output file is created and functions as intended.

Testing the compiled version

The last thing we have left to do is to make sure that everything went well in the process. We start by making the compiled file executable with chmod a+x scriptname . Next we test its output — In our case running:

./scriptname Medium 

writes “How are you Medium?” to screen.