Hi all,
I'm building executables from a set of object files and none of the object file is created in debug mode i.e no -g option is used, still the compiler/ld is putting debug sections and .symtab sections under section header colomns in the elf executables causing the size to increase substantially, i know a "strip" would do the needful but i don't want to do that, i wrote a test program and compiled it and was surprised to see these sections in its executable too. This is the output of gcc -v :-
a$ gcc -v

Reading specs from /lib/gcc-lib/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.2.2/specs
Configured with: ../gcc-3.2.2/configure --prefix=/gcc-3.2.2-nonshared --with-gnu-as --with-as=/binutils-2.13/bin/as --with-gnu-ld --with-ld=/binutils-2.13/bin/ld --disable-shared
Thread model: posix
gcc version 3.2.2

The architecture is red-hat linux 7.2, kernel is 2.4.7-10,

for further information feel free to contact me.

Thanks,
Rajesh

So strip them. It works. Problem solved.

yeah dats an option, but as i mentioned, i don't want to do that, can you suggest any alternative approach ?? \

Some compilers (not gcc) offer an -s option. This produces a stripped executable.

What kind of "other choice" are you after - there are none short of writing your own version strip and incorporating it into your compiler....?