A.5. Binutils

A.5.1. Official Download Location

Binutils (2.14): 
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/

A.5.2. Contents of Binutils

Binutils is a collection of software development tools containing a linker, assembler and other tools to work with object files and archives.

Installed programs: addr2line, ar, as, c++filt, gprof, ld, nm, objcopy, objdump, ranlib, readelf, size, strings and strip

Installed libraries: libiberty.a, libbfd.[a,so] and libopcodes.[a,so]

A.5.3.

A.5.4. Short descriptions

addr2line translates program addresses to file names and line numbers. Given an address and the name of an executable, it uses the debugging information in the executable to figure out which source file and line number are associated with the address.

ar creates, modifies, and extracts from archives. An archive is a single file holding a collection of other files in a structure that makes it possible to retrieve the original individual files (called members of the archive).

as is an assembler. It assembles the output of gcc into object files.

c++filt is used by the linker to demangle C++ and Java symbols, to keep overloaded functions from clashing.

gprof displays call graph profile data.

ld is a linker. It combines a number of object and archive files into a single file, relocating their data and tying up symbol references.

nm lists the symbols occurring in a given object file.

objcopy is used to translate one type of object file into another.

objdump displays information about the given object file, with options controlling what particular information to display. The information shown is mostly only useful to programmers who are working on the compilation tools.

ranlib generates an index of the contents of an archive, and stores it in the archive. The index lists all the symbols defined by archive members that are relocatable object files.

readelf displays information about elf type binaries.

size lists the section sizes -- and the grand total -- for the given object files.

strings outputs for each file given the sequences of printable characters that are of at least the specified length (defaulting to 4) For object files it prints by default only the strings from the initializing and loading sections. For other types of files it scans the whole file.

strip discards symbols from object files.

libiberty contains routines used by various GNU programs, including getopt, obstack, strerror, strtol and strtoul.

libbfd is the Binary File Descriptor library.

libopcodes is a library for dealing with opcodes. It is used for building utilities like objdump. Opcodes are the "readable text" versions of instructions for the processor.

A.5.5.

A.5.6. Binutils Installation Dependencies

Binutils depends on: Bash, Coreutils, Diffutils, GCC, Gettext, Glibc, Grep, Make, Perl, Sed, Texinfo.