-s falg on cc

[dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe]

In article <6585 at hydra.gatech.EDU> ccoprrm at prism.gatech.EDU (Robert E. Minsk) writes:
>
>  A quick and simple question:
>I noticed in the makefile for 4Dgifts/iristools/imgtools that one of the
>CFLAGS was -s.  The man page makes no mention of this flag.  What does it
>do?
>
>-- 
>Robert E. Minsk - Office of Computing Services        | Save the whales...    |
>ARPA: ccoprrm at prism.gatech.edu                        | Collect the whole set |
>uucp: ...!{allegra,amd,hplabs,seismo,ut-ngp}!gatech!prism!ccoprrm
>Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta Georgia, 30332 


the "-s" flag derives from LD(1):

     -s   Strip the symbolic information from the output object file.

this will pare-down the size of yer final executable by a [potentially]
significant amount.  the "-s" flag seems to me to be primarily useful 
when yer generating yer final finished-version of the executable file
yer making.  at this point, since all symbolic info is now gone, there
h'ain't much use re: any kind of debugging since any such minimal hooks
still in the executable are now gone.  (like if you generate a 

"Segmentation fault (core dumped)"

and then try to do a 

dbx executable-name
(dbx) where

you won't be able to get the standard kind of line number/statement-it-
failed-on feedback but instead will only see things like:

warning: Has no symbol table -- very little is supported without it
)
--
                                             daveus rattus   

                                   yer friendly neighborhood ratman

                              KOYAANISQATSI

   ko.yan.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language)  n.  1. crazy life.  2. life
     in turmoil.  3. life out of balance.  4. life disintegrating.  
     5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.