Executable Object Files

Now, it's time to talk about executable object files. You should know by now that executable object file is one of the final products of a C project. Like relocatable object files, they have the same items in the:; the machine-level instructions, the values for initialized global variables, and the symbol tabl;t however, the arrangement can be different. We can show this regarding the ELF executable object files since it would be easy to generate them and study their internal structure.

In order to produce an executable ELF object file, we continue with example 3.1. In the previous section, we generated relocatable object files for the two sources existing in the example, and in this section, we are going to link them to form an executable file.

The following commands do that for you, as explained in the previous chapter:

$ gcc funcs.o main.o -o ex3_1.out
$ 

Shell Box 3-5: Linking previously built relocatable object files in example 3.1

In...