PE

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With Windows 95/NT, a new executable file type was required. Thus was born the "PE" Portable Executable, which is still in use. Unlike its predecessors, WIN-PE is a true 32bit file format, supporting relocatable code. It does distinguish between TEXT, DATA, and BSS. It is, in fact, a bastardized version of the COFF format.

If you did set up a Cygwin environment on your Windows machine, "PE" is the target format for your Cygwin GCC toolchain, which causes the unaware some headache when trying to link parts build under Cygwin with parts build under Linux or BSD (which use the ELF target by default). (Hint: You have to build a GCC Cross-Compiler)

Operating Systems that use it: Windows 95/98/NT, the Mobius.

See Also

• MSDN documentation about PE format
• http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierrelib/exec_formats/PE_v1.0.html
• http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierrelib/exec_formats/OMF_v1.1.html