hello. I was looking around my hard drive hoping to learn something. I found a bunch of .dll files, but I cant open them in my text editor. does anyone know how to read a .dll program? like what software do I need?

DLL stands for dynamically linked library. Think of them as programs that other programs can use. They are compiled files in binary format. You can't open and read a dll like you would a text file or source file.

If you use Linux at all, they are the same thing as a Shared Library, or Shared Object in Linux/Unix. "Computer security." — Oxymoron

"... hoping to learn something." Like what, exactly? They can be viewed, sure, with something like LIST or a hex editor, but by and large the contents will be meaningless to you. Checking their properties via r-click may elicit version and other information Some DLLs contain icons - IrfanView can be used to examine those I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter

Yes, it's true, unless someone left the debugging symbols on the dll (Highly unlikely in an MS app.. but you never know, they might be slacking now a- days) you'd pretty much have to be an expert decompiler to start on this. Some dlls are actually just python scripts (or similar) and you can open these with text editor, but you'll only really find python in open-source stuff and not, as I'm guessing, ijn your win32 directory

you can easily open the .dll file's . there is a software you can download from www.heaventools.com you can visit that & can easily download the software .And see the .dll files