peutil

peutil is a software utility designed to operate on Windows Portable Executable (PE) format files, including EXE, DLL, and SYS binaries. It is used to inspect, analyze, and perform light-weight manipulation of PE images, supporting tasks common in development, reverse engineering, and incident response. The tool emphasizes fast, scriptable access to core PE structures and metadata without requiring a full disassembly workflow.

Typical capabilities include displaying PE headers and machine characteristics, enumerating sections and their attributes, listing import and export tables, and revealing embedded resources. It can also report on data directory contents, verify digital signatures where present, and compute basic integrity checks such as checksums. Some releases offer patching or patch-friendly features that allow updating headers or modifying bytes within safe bounds, as well as resource extraction or export of metadata to human- and machine-readable formats. The exact feature set is version-dependent.

peutil is designed to be portable across major operating systems and architectures and often ships with a modular core library that can be embedded in other tools or extended via plugins. It typically provides a command-line interface and may expose scripting options or bindings for higher-level languages, enabling automated analyses or integration into larger workflows. The project is usually open-source and maintained by a community of contributors, with releases tied to PE format revisions and security research needs.