From the (Mac OS X, but others are similar) man page: strip removes or modifies the symbol table attached to the output of the assembler and link editor. This is useful to save space after a program has been debugged and to limit dynamically bound symbols. Note the bit about “after a program has been … Read more
I stumbled across this question and thought it deserved an answer. Have elf.h handy. You can find it on the internet. Each RELA section contains an array of Elf32_Rela entries as you know, but is also tied to a certain other section. r_offset is an offset into that other section (in this case – it … Read more
Variable names don’t exist anymore after the compiler runs (barring special cases like exported globals in shared libraries or debug symbols). The entire act of compilation is intended to take those symbolic names and algorithms represented by your source code and turn them into native machine instructions. So yes, if you have a global variable_name, … Read more
There are two common and related meaning of symbol tables here. First, there’s the symbol table in your object files. Usually, a C or C++ compiler compiles a single source file into an object file with a .obj or .o extension. This contains a collection of executable code and data that the linker can process … Read more