CRUNCHIDE(1)

💅 crunchide — hiding symbol names from ld, bestie edition

okay so real talk, this is a page from the General Commands Manual and it's called crunchide — yes, lowercase, that's its whole name, and it is literally the "hides symbol names from ld, for crunching programs together" tool. iconic behaviour honestly.

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

crunchide [-f keep-list-file] [-k keep-symbol] [object-file ...]

that's it. that's the whole vibe check. three little options and some files. slay.

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so here's the tea 🍵 — crunchide hides the global symbols of object-file so that they get ignored by any linker runs that happen after it, specifically runs of the linker, ld(1). like, it ghosts those symbols. they're still there, they're just not speaking to the linker anymore.

but bestie, some symbols are allowed to stay visible 👀 — you do that with the -k keep-symbol and -f keep-list-file options. the keep-list-file must contain a list of symbols to keep visible, one symbol per line (no cap, one per line, that's the rule 🎀).

lowkey important detail: the names you pass with keep-symbol or put in keep-list-file should be C names. so for example — and this is the example, fr fr — to keep the C function "foo" visible, you'd use the option "-k foo". chill, right?

and the lore? crunchide is designed as a companion program for crunchgen(1), which automates the process of creating crunched binaries from multiple component programs. it's giving supporting-role main character energy 💅.

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• crunchgen(1)
• ld(1)

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

the crunch utility was written by James da Silva <jds@cs.umd.edu>.

Copyright (c) 1994 University of Maryland. All Rights Reserved.

Chris Demetriou <cgd@netbsd.org> reorganized crunchide so that it supported multiple object formats, and added ELF object support and ECOFF object recognition. multi-format glow-up, we love to see it ✨.

Copyright (c) 1997 Christopher G. Demetriou. All Rights Reserved.

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and that's the whole page, bestie — courtesy of Debian, dated June 14, 1994, from CRUNCHIDE(1) 🫶 go hide some symbols, you got this 💖ྀི🦋