win_depends

🧩 win_depends is a lightweight tool to analyze DLL and EXE dependencies on Windows. It supports recursive dependency resolution, detection of missing or unused files, and exports to DOT graph format.

📦 Installation

pip install win_depends

🚀 Usage Example

Run the tool in a directory containing .dll and .exe files:

win_depends

You can also specify a path to a file or directory:

win_depends ./path/to/myapp.exe
win_depends ./build/bin/

Optional flags can customize the output, such as displaying a dependency tree:

win_depends ./build/bin --tree
```bash
win_depends

Optional flags can customize the output, such as displaying a dependency tree:

win_depends --tree

🔍 Features

• ✅ Analyze imports between .dll and .exe files, including delayed and bound imports
• ✅ Detect forwarded exports and surface forwarding targets directly in tree / missing / invalid outputs (DLL name only)
• ✅ Resolve api-ms-* / ext-ms-* contracts to host DLLs (for example kernelbase.dll) to avoid false missing reports
• ✅ Parallel dependency analysis for faster performance
• ✅ Automatic detection of system DLLs (always enabled)
• ✅ Detect missing dependent files
• ✅ Detect unused files in directory
• ✅ Tree-style output of dependencies
• ✅ Export to DOT format for graph visualization

🧪 Sample Output

$ win_depends ./demo.exe --tree

└── demo.exe
    ├── user32.dll ❌
    ├── plugin.dll
    │   └── helper.dll
    └── kernel32.dll ❌

Missing dependencies:
  user32.dll
  kernel32.dll