How To Install electric-fence on Kali Linux

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install electric-fence on Kali Linux.

What is electric-fence

electric-fence is:

Electric Fence is a debugger that uses virtual memory hardware to detect illegal memory accesses. It can detect two common programming bugs: software that overruns or underruns the boundaries of a malloc() memory allocation, and software that touches a memory allocation that has been released by free().

Unlike other malloc() debuggers, Electric Fence will detect read accesses as well as writes, and it will stop and pinpoint the exact instruction that causes an error. It is not as thorough as Purify, however.

In order to debug a program it needs to be linked with Electric Fence’s library or dynamic linking needs to be used; README.Debian explains that in detail.

There are three methods to install electric-fence on Kali Linux. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install electric-fence Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install electric-fence using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install electric-fence

Install electric-fence Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install electric-fence using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install electric-fence

Install electric-fence Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude on Kali Linux first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Kali Linux. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install electric-fence using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install electric-fence

How To Uninstall electric-fence on Kali Linux

To uninstall only the electric-fence package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove electric-fence

Uninstall electric-fence And Its Dependencies

To uninstall electric-fence and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Kali Linux, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove electric-fence

Remove electric-fence Configurations and Data

To remove electric-fence configuration and data from Kali Linux we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge electric-fence

Remove electric-fence configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove electric-fence configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge electric-fence

Dependencies

electric-fence have the following dependencies:

• libc6

References

• electric-fence website

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install electric-fence package on Kali Linux using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.