My company bought IDA & we recently upgraded to 4.15. Somewhere I go the impression that you can do something like automatically retain a variable name in a subfunction that you named in a parent.

Like this

function a (arg1, arg2)
{ b (arg1); }

If I give arg1 a different name in a, it propogates to b.

Does anyone know how to do this? Or have a script for it?

In Kernel Options 2 subscreen, there is an option to propogate "stack argument information". However, I cant say Ive ever managed to get much use out of this, even after a code reanalysis.

Note that the argument info would have to propogate upwards, not downwards, Ie you define the stack var in func b, and it propogates upwards to func A. This prevents problems where func B is called by func A but also by func C.

Also, I work on the assumption that the function (func B) must actually be declared as a function in IDA, not just a labelled code block, and that the function must have its own ebp based stack frame.

It might be worth posting this to the IDA forum. I too, would be interested to see its usage.

Regards

Carpathia

as carpathia said already, argument propagation works upwards (it's logical if you
think about it - the lower level function provides (defines) the interface that is
used to call it in the first place). to let IDA know that a given function has a C
prototype, you not only have to make it a function (default hotkey: p) but also
declare the prototype (default hotkey: y) or have IDA parse an .h file that has it.