Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!DBNUAMA1.BITNET!VBRANDT
From: VBRANDT@DBNUAMA1.BITNET
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Strange '-s' flag behavior in the GNU linker ?
Message-ID: <8809150858.AA16391@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 15 Sep 88 08:59:17 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 17
X-Unparsable-Date: Thu, 15 Sep 88 11:01:11 SET


   I have found what is not quite a bug, but a somewhat annoying feature in the
GNU C linker. It seems that the '-s' flag does exactly the opposite of what I
think it should do. If you don't specify '-s', the linker appends a symbol
table to the executable, if you do specify it, no symbol table is produced.

   This means that to make executables without symbol tables, one cannot use
GCC, but has to invoke everything manually. Also, all the executables from
the GNU package themselves have quite big symbol tables. Removing them would
save several KB, which might help people suffering from storage/memory
shortages.

   Anyway, thanks to John for his impressive work !

Bitnet:  VBRANDT@DBNUAMA1                              Volker A. Brandt
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