use Perl

I figured out last night that I could use allocate memory within another process for the purposes of using more complicated APIs. In the below example, I attached to one of my shells and queried the groups out of it.

In this snippet, the target shell tells me its process id is 40728.

Last login: Fri Jan  8 16:51:00 on ttys000
w3m211a:~ jjore$ echo $$
40728

I'm calling the (int)getgroups( int, int* ) kernel function. I start by getting the size of an integer because I'm going to allocate some multiple of this.

w3m211a:~ jjore$ gdb -p 40728
 
(gdb) print sizeof(int)
$1 = 4

Call (int)getgroups(int,int*) once to get the number of groups I'm a member of.

(gdb) print (int)getgroups(0,0)
$2 = 16

Allocate 64 bytes of memory to hold my groups[16] array.

(gdb) print (void*)malloc(64)
$3 = (void *) 0x10010fca0

Call (int)getgroups(int,int*) again but this time the kernel will write to my memory with the group ids.

(gdb) print (int)getgroups($2,$3)
$4 = 16

Print the 16 decimal numbers out of memory

(gdb) x/16d $3
0x10010fca0:    2042662593    401    1612991420    1178352327
0x10010fcb0:    102    800006232    204    100
0x10010fcc0:    98    81    80    79
0x10010fcd0:    62    12    155049148    2133303823

Clean up

(gdb) print (void)free($3)
$5 = void