michael105 / shrinkelf Goto Github PK

Shrinkelf

Strip elf binaries aggressively.

Might work only for statically linked binaries, but not severely tested.

I (misc) ported the code to work with 64bit binaries, and to compile with minilib (or the standard c lib) without external dependencies. The original source can be found at https://github.com/berney/superstrip.

Compile

Just type make.

To download and link with minilib, type make -f minilib.make.

Doc

Usage: shrinkelf [file]

(copied from the original source)

[file] must be a seekable ELF file, and this is only useful for an executable, possibly only for a statically linked executable. It will be copied to a temporary file, but only those parts which are mapped in memory upon loading will be kept: all other data, such as symbol names, section names, section tables, debugging information, etc, are discarded. Thus, this is like the "strip" operation, but even more radical. The primary author advises you to use this program only in situations where disk space is extremely scarce (e.g. on a floppy). Note that this will not gain you any space in memory, by definition.

Some important caveats: Do not use on object files, nor on dynamic libraries with which you intend to link (I mean ld-link, not run-time link), this would make them useless. Use on dynamic libraries only intended for run-time link, or on dynamically linked executable, appears to work in some situations, but this is by no means guaranteed (of course, nothing about this program is guaranteed anyway, see above) and strongly discouraged. Only 32-bit ELF is supported at the moment. Support for 64-bit ELF is intended in a future version. Only native endianness is supported. That is, the program will only treat ELF files made for a machine with the same endianness as that on which it runs. This has not been extensively tested yet and many bugs are probably still lurking.