Re: strip/objcopy will not remove dynamic symbols

["H. J. Lu" <hjl at lucon dot org>]

On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 06:23:09PM -0700, William Croft wrote:
> When I use the "-N symbolname" option of strip or objcopy, the symbol IS 
> removed from the "normal" symbol table (as shown by "nm -a").  But the 
> symbol is NOT removed from the dynamic table ("nm -D").
> 
> Can anyone suggest a workaround that will allow me to remove a dynamic 
> symbol?  Or hint at what might be the area to look at in the source?  I'm 
> currently running binutils 2.13.90.0.18 from Redhat Linux 9, but could 
> build my own patched version of strip.
> 
> The symbols I'm trying to remove are in our product shared library (say 
> "foo.so") that does some license file checks via calling functions internal 
> to foo.so.  But the license functions were pulled in from a "bar.a" library 
> used in linking foo.so.  Hence the license functions in foo.so are marked 
> in the nm output as 'T' (internally defined global text symbols).  But they 
> are not called from outside foo.so, so they can be safely deleted from all 
> symbol tables.

If you don't want them in the dynamic symbol table, you should make
them internal to foo.so. You can do it with symbol visibility or
linker script.


H.J.