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| Next: <a href="Archives.html#Archives" accesskey="n" rel="next">Archives</a>, Previous: <a href="Sections.html#Sections" accesskey="p" rel="prev">Sections</a>, Up: <a href="BFD-front-end.html#BFD-front-end" accesskey="u" rel="up">BFD front end</a> [<a href="index.html#SEC_Contents" title="Table of contents" rel="contents">Contents</a>][<a href="BFD-Index.html#BFD-Index" title="Index" rel="index">Index</a>]</p> |
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| <a name="Symbols-1"></a> |
| <h3 class="section">2.7 Symbols</h3> |
| <p>BFD tries to maintain as much symbol information as it can when |
| it moves information from file to file. BFD passes information |
| to applications though the <code>asymbol</code> structure. When the |
| application requests the symbol table, BFD reads the table in |
| the native form and translates parts of it into the internal |
| format. To maintain more than the information passed to |
| applications, some targets keep some information “behind the |
| scenes” in a structure only the particular back end knows |
| about. For example, the coff back end keeps the original |
| symbol table structure as well as the canonical structure when |
| a BFD is read in. On output, the coff back end can reconstruct |
| the output symbol table so that no information is lost, even |
| information unique to coff which BFD doesn’t know or |
| understand. If a coff symbol table were read, but were written |
| through an a.out back end, all the coff specific information |
| would be lost. The symbol table of a BFD |
| is not necessarily read in until a canonicalize request is |
| made. Then the BFD back end fills in a table provided by the |
| application with pointers to the canonical information. To |
| output symbols, the application provides BFD with a table of |
| pointers to pointers to <code>asymbol</code>s. This allows applications |
| like the linker to output a symbol as it was read, since the “behind |
| the scenes” information will be still available. |
| </p><table class="menu" border="0" cellspacing="0"> |
| <tr><td align="left" valign="top">• <a href="Reading-Symbols.html#Reading-Symbols" accesskey="1">Reading Symbols</a>:</td><td> </td><td align="left" valign="top"> |
| </td></tr> |
| <tr><td align="left" valign="top">• <a href="Writing-Symbols.html#Writing-Symbols" accesskey="2">Writing Symbols</a>:</td><td> </td><td align="left" valign="top"> |
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| <tr><td align="left" valign="top">• <a href="Mini-Symbols.html#Mini-Symbols" accesskey="3">Mini Symbols</a>:</td><td> </td><td align="left" valign="top"> |
| </td></tr> |
| <tr><td align="left" valign="top">• <a href="typedef-asymbol.html#typedef-asymbol" accesskey="4">typedef asymbol</a>:</td><td> </td><td align="left" valign="top"> |
| </td></tr> |
| <tr><td align="left" valign="top">• <a href="symbol-handling-functions.html#symbol-handling-functions" accesskey="5">symbol handling functions</a>:</td><td> </td><td align="left" valign="top"> |
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