Help my understanding of compiled code

Okay, so an executable file, say one compiled by gcc, they call that a
binary... But I look through it and their are clearly lots of
human-readable strings and stuff. So my question is, what's in a
compiled program? I want to automate a kind of
platform-independent machine code searching thing, but I'm not sure
quite where to begin.


Nerkul
[Strings are strings, the object version is the same as the source version
except for the way they're delimited. Everything else is translated to
forms the hardware can understand, e.g., machine instructions for code,
binary formats of numbers. My "Linkers and Loaders" has a fairly long
(maybe too long) discussion of both machine architecture and object file
formats. -John]

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