Topic summary
Object files
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Object file.
Object file formats
Some systems make a distinction between formats which are directly executable and formats which require processing by the linker. For example, OS/360 and successors call the first format a load module and the second an object module. In this case the files have entirely different formats. DOS and Windows also have different file formats for executable files and object files, such as Portable Executable for executables and COFF for object files in 32-bit and 64-bit Windows.