Re: [suse-programming-e] Elf documentation?

On Sunday 24 July 2005 21:45, Philipp Thomas wrote:

"Steven T. Hatton" :

...

I'm trying to get an overview of elf, and I'm not sure what I should be looking at.

A pdf of an older version of the ELF standard is here: http://www.tachyonsoft.com/elf.pdf

I'd propose to start at http://refspecs.freestandards.org/LSB_3.0.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-gener ic/elfintro.html

and then following the links.

...

I just installed libelf, but I'm not sure what this will do for me.

libelf allows you to read elf binaries. This allows simple info, like what architecture the binary was compiled for or complex applications like ltrace which uses and manipulates loaded binaries to accomplish its tracing.

I have to explore what ltrace can do for me. It looks quite interesting. As for libelf, I should point out that I'm allergic to C. (actually I believe it's Cpp that causes the violent reactions :/ ) I found this little toolkit on sourcforge: http://elfio.sourceforge.net/index.php It looks pretty handy. I'm playing around with creating an XML representation of the file structure. Ideally, I would like to chart the whole dependency graph for a library. Do such tools already exist? I know there are such tools as objdump, but I'm looking for some thing more graphical. -- Regards, Steven