readelf is a program for displaying various information about

object file An object file is a computer file containing object code, that is, machine code output of an assembler or compiler. The object code is usually relocatable, and not usually directly executable. There are various formats for object files, and the ...

s on

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

-like systems such as

objdump objdump is a command-line program for displaying various information about object files on Unix-like operating systems. For instance, it can be used as a disassembler to view an executable in assembly form. It is part of the GNU Binutils for fine- ...

. It is part of the

GNU binutils The GNU Binary Utilities, or , are a set of programming tools for creating and managing binary programs, object files, libraries, profile data, and assembly source code. Tools They were originally written by programmers at Cygnus Solutions. ...

readelf and objdump

has a similar function but with different features like disassembling. The main difference is that readelf does not depend on BFD and helps to check if BFD works.

Example

The following command displays the contents of the file's dynamic section (to examine the

shared library In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and subr ...

dependencies and

rpath rPath, Inc. was a technology company based in Raleigh, North Carolina that developed technology to automate the process of constructing (or packaging), deploying and updating software.Craig, Julie. "Cloud Coalition: rPath, newScale, and Eucalyp ...

): $ readelf -d

References

Unix programming tools GNU Project software {{unix-stub