Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!philmds!leo
From: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Strange '-s' flag behavior in the GNU linker ?
Summary: '-s' means: strip
Message-ID: <807@philmds.UUCP>
Date: 16 Sep 88 10:34:39 GMT
References: <8809150858.AA16391@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Reply-To: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Organization: Philips I&E DTS Eindhoven
Lines: 29

In article <8809150858.AA16391@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> VBRANDT@DBNUAMA1.BITNET writes:
>
>   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.

'-s' does not stand for symbol / no symbol, but for strip. This option
is passed to the loader, and means: strip off the symbol table. The
default in Unix is to have a symbol table in your executable (so the
debuggers are not too bad to work with, although -g is preferred if you
want to use dbx).

>   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.

I do not quite understand your problem. Put the -s in your makefile, or
add -s to CFLAGS.  Now you can invoke make with no special parameters.
As for removing symbol tables, that's a job for strip(1); no doubt there'll
be an ST version soon (if it isn't already there).

>   Anyway, thanks to John for his impressive work !

I fully agree.

                  Leo.