Frequently Asked Questions

How to extract digitally signed exe's?

Pyinstxtractor will not work with digitally signed exe's as-is. You need to remove the signature first. There are several tools for this purpose:

• Unsigntool
• RemoveSignCode
• FileUnsigner
• signtool

Do I need to fix the header of the extracted .pyc's?

You do not need to fix the header of the extracted pyc's. They are automatically taken care of. In case you are using an old version of pyinstxtractor from SourceForge please update to the latest version from here.

Is it necessary to run the script in the same version of Python which was used to build the executable?

It's important to use the same version of Python. If you don't know which version of Python has been used, run the script once and it would tell you the version of Python.

What can go wrong if I use a different version of Python?

Firstly, if you use a different version of Python, pyinstxtractor will not extract the PYZ archive. Secondly, the magic signature of the extracted pyc's (first 4 bytes) in the top-level directory will be wrong. In such cases, de-compiling the pyc's will fail. If you are familiar with Python internals and pyc file format you can of-course correct the header manually using a hex editor.