Comparing object files

| Does anyone know of a utility to compare functions in an unstripped object
| file? In particular, I want such a utility for 80386 ELF files.
|
| I'm making many changes to a large C program (and it's #includes) and want
| to be able to tell exactly which functions I impacted (and know that I
| didn't affect others).
|
| I'd like to be able to compile this program without my changes and
| then with my changes (using the same compiler and options) and then see
| the functions that changed.


It would perhaps be simpler to write a wrapper around your compiler
that first compiles with the -S option and then assembles the
resulting .s file. That way to compare things, just use diff, which
will tell you where the first change is (when comparing assembly
files, changes made after the first change may percolate through the
rest of the file as statement labels/registers change). It is usually
helpful to compiler with -g to identify the line associated with the
change.


I'm using GCC's -save-temps switch (which saves the .s file and
continues on) in precisely this fashion to tune the intel 386 port
right now. I also find emacs19.24's ediff mode to be helpful in
identifying exactly what changed, since it will highlight (on my X
screen) exactly what parts of the line changed, allowing me to quickly
skip over local labels that have changed due to earlier changes, and
different register assignments.


--
Michael Meissner email: meissner@osf.org phone: 617-621-8861
Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02142
--

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