How Does 'C' Store Strings ?

[Conor P. Cahill]

In article <2141 at avsd.UUCP>, childers at avsd.UUCP (Richard Childers) writes:

> Basically, no matter how I look at the resulting executable - whether
> with my 'strings', or a quick-and-dirty 'od' - I can't find the ASCII
> characters corresponding to the strings I thought I had compiled into
> the executable.

How are you opening the input file?  In MSC you must specify something
like O_BINARY in order to read a complete non-text file.  The strings
are stored the same way in MSC as they are stored in UNIX executables -
non-compressed sequences of characters followed by a null byte.

Long ago I wrote a strings for dos which worked correctly under MSC 3.0.
I don't know where it is now.

> 	#define	vers[CMDBUFSIZ] =	"v1.00 891010 richard childers" ;

What is this supposed to do?  First of all the only way to use it is to
have a global variable as follows:

	char string_you_want vers;

which is totally unreadable.  What were you attempting to do?  There is
nothing that you can do through the preprocessor that you couldn't do
directly in the code.

> One of the possibilities I've considered includes the fact that, while I've
> defined this array, I've never referenced it, and thus the compiler might
> have decided to optomize it out of existence.

If this was true, all of the sccsid and rcsid strings would never
appear in the object files (which they do).



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