I created idalink to be able to easily use IDA's API for analysis without being stuck in the IDA interface. It's rather hackish, but that's your problem :-)

This works by spawning ida in screen in the background, and connecting to it using RPyC.

idalink requires the following:

• ida
• screen
• rpyc in your Python environment outside of IDA
• rpyc in your IDA Python environment. This is actually included in the repository, because it's easier.

To setup idalink, replace the idal and idal64 symlinks in the idalink/ directory with symlinks to your actual idal and idal64 executables.

To use idalink, put it in a place where you can import it and do, in any python session (ie, outside of IDA):

import idalink

# if you want to change the log file location
# 	idalink.logfile = "/path/to/log/file"
# if you don't want to deal with the idal and idal64 symlinks
#	idalink.ida_dir = "/path/to/ida"

# connect
ida = idalink.IDALink("/path/to/binary/file")

# use idc
print "Default ScreenEA is %x" % ida.idc.ScreenEA()

# use idautils
for s in ida.idautils.Segments():
	print "Segment at %x is named %s" % (s, ida.idc.SegName(s))

# use idaapi
for s in ida.idautils.Functions():
	print "Byte at at %x is %x" % (s, ida.idaapi.get_byte(s))

# access IDA memory in a dict way
print "Byte at at %x is %x" % (s, ida.mem[s])

# close IDA (or allow it to be garbage-collected)
ida.link.close()

And that's that. Basically, you get access to the IDA API from outside of IDA. Good stuff.

There are a few issues.

• the detection for whether to use idal or idal64 is very simplistic (greps for 32 or 64 in the output of the file command) and probably needs to be improved
• a random port between 40000 and 49999 is chosen for communication, with no error-checking for failed IDA startups.
• ida-backed memory is not really tested, and uses Heads for getting the "mapped" list, which is slow and incomplete