IDA Pro: Is there a command-line way to generate idb files without generating asm files?

Question

Currently, I'm generating a bunch of .idb files in a batch via idaw.exe -B <FILE>. (I'm using IDA Pro 6.8.) This process also creates many .asm files - one for each .idb file created. I don't need these files, so they just get ignored/deleted.

Is there a way to generate .idb files from the command line without also generating the .asm files?

Answer 1

At the bottom of the help page you can see the following:

For batch mode, IDA must be invoked with the following command line:

ida -B input-file

which is equivalent to:

ida -c -A -Sanalysis.idc input-file

I.e. the actual analysis and writing of .asm is done by analysis.idc. Looking into it, we can see:

static main()
{
  // turn on coagulation of data in the final pass of analysis
  set_inf_attr(INF_AF, get_inf_attr(INF_AF) | AF_DODATA | AF_FINAL);
  // .. and plan the entire address space for the final pass
  auto_mark_range(0, BADADDR, AU_FINAL);
msg("Waiting for the end of the auto analysis...\n");
  auto_wait();
msg("\n\n------ Creating the output file.... --------\n");
  auto file = get_idb_path()[0:-4] + ".asm";
auto fhandle = fopen(file, "w");
  gen_file(OFILE_ASM, fhandle, 0, BADADDR, 0); // create the assembler file
  msg("All done, exiting...\n");
  qexit(0); // exit to OS, error code 0 - success
}

So just make your own copy of the script, remove the part writing out .asm file (gen_file call), and run IDA with your own script:

ida -c -A -Smyanalysis.idc -Lida.log input-file