relative value of stripping symbols

[Russ Kepler]

In article <690011 at hpfelg.HP.COM> jk at hpfelg.HP.COM (John Kessenich) writes:
>
>There may be another issue:  security.  Consider a program secured through
>some mechanism (e.g. CPU serial number) by a function in the executable 
>that checks the security mechanism and returns an appropriate value to 
>its calling function, which then acts on the result.  If the security 
>function has a meaningful name, having the symbol table present greatly 
>simplifies the task of a user editing the executable to effectively turn 
>off security checks.

If you are using 'strip' for security you should perhaps consider
using the '-s' option in 'ld' instead.  On one of the systems that
we ported to the 'strip' command simply set a pointer/flag to tell
'nm' that there weren't any symbols.  File size remained the same.

using 'cc -s' generated an executable considerably smaller...

-- 
Russ Kepler -  Basis International
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