Discovering memory structure
Unix-like operating systems provide a set of tools for inspecting the memory segments of a process. You learn in this section that some of these segments reside within the executable object file, and other segments are created dynamically at runtime, when the process is spawned.
As you should already know from the two previous chapters, an executable object file and a process are not the same thing, therefore it is expected to have different tools for inspecting each of them.
From the previous chapters, we know that an executable object file contains the machine instructions, and it is produced by the compiler. But a process is a running program spawned by executing an executable object file, consuming a region of the main memory, and the CPU is constantly fetching and executing its instructions.
A process is a living entity that is being executed inside the operating system while the executable object file is just a file containing a premade...
