Executable files

In computing, executable code or an executable file or executable program, sometimes simply referred to as an executable or binary, causes a computer "to perform indicated tasks according to encoded instructions," as opposed to a data file that must be parsed by a program to be meaningful.

The exact interpretation depends upon the use - while "instructions" is traditionally taken to mean machine code instructions for a physical CPU, in some contexts a file containing bytecode or scripting language instructions may also be considered executable.

While an executable file can be hand-coded in machine language, it is far more usual to develop software as source code in a high-level language easily understood by humans, or in some cases in assembly language, which remains human-readable while being more closely associated with machine code instructions. The high-level language is compiled into either an executable machine code file or a non-executable machine-code object file of some sort; the equivalent process on assembly language source code is called assembly. Several object files are linked to create the executable. Object files, executable or not, are typically in a container format, such as Executable and Linkable Format (ELF). This structures the generated machine code, for example dividing it into sections such as the .text (executable code), .data (static variables), and .rodata (static constants).

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