The Portable Executable (PE) format is an executable file format used in 32-bit versions of Windows operating systems. PE is basically an extended version of the Unix COFF file format.

Computer viruses that infect PE files, such as CIH, often fill in the empty spaces within the file, so the file size does not grow.

External links

• http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/hardware/PECOFF.mspx
• http://caolan.wvware.com/~caolan/publink/winresdump/winresdump/doc/pefile.html