[Call for testers] "BSD ar"

[Peter Wemm]

On Jan 13, 2008 11:10 AM, Kai Wang <kaiwang27 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 13, 2008 at 10:39:15AM -0800, David O'Brien wrote:
> > Hi Kai,
> > I'm sorry I wasn't clear enough - can your BSD 'ar', built on amd64
> > handle both 32-bit (i.e., "i386") and 64-bit (i.e., "amd64) ELF archives?
> >
> > >From the above it almost seems you're saying it can handle that plus more
> > (other non-x86 arches).  Is that correct?
>
> Yes. BSD 'ar' can handle all the ELF variants(64/32, LE/BE),
> regardless of the arch it is built on . This is inherited from libelf.

Speaking of libelf..  Do you think I can tempt anybody into writing a
mcs(1) program?

http://cc.in2p3.fr/doc/phpman.php/man/mcs/1

DESCRIPTION
     The mcs command is used to manipulate a section, by  default
     the  .comment  section, in an ELF object file. It is used to
     add to, delete, print, and compress the contents of  a  sec-
     tion in an ELF object file ...

The main usefulness is adding custom comments to the #ident section,
printing the contents (ala ident(1)), removing duplicate comments, or
stripping the comments totally.

I've always missed this program...  it never made it into binutils.
-- 
Peter Wemm - peter at wemm.org; peter at FreeBSD.org; peter at yahoo-inc.com
"All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5