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- <a name="Symbols"></a>
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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">
- </td></tr>
- <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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