Archive Processing

Archives are built using ar(1). Archives usually consist of a collection of relocatable objects with an archive symbol table. This symbol table provides an association of symbol definitions with the objects that supply these definitions. By default, the link-editor provides selective extraction of archive members. The link-editor uses unresolved symbolic references to select objects from the archive that are required to complete the binding process. You can also explicitly extract all members of an archive.

The link-editor extracts a relocatable object from an archive under the following conditions.

• The archive member contains a symbol definition that satisfies a symbol reference, presently held in the link-editor's internal symbol table. This reference is sometimes referred to as an undefined symbol.

• The archive member contains a data symbol definition that satisfies a tentative symbol definition presently held in the link-editor's internal symbol table. An example is a FORTRAN COMMON block definition, which causes the extraction of a relocatable object that defines the same DATA symbol.

• The archive member contains a symbol definition that matches a reference that requires hidden visibility or protected visibility. See Table 7–20.

• The link-editors -z allextract is in effect. This option suspends selective archive extraction and causes all archive members to be extracted from the archive being processed.

Under selective archive extraction, a weak symbol reference does not extract an object from an archive unless the -z weakextract option is in effect. See Simple Resolutions for more information.

The options -z weakextract, -z allextract, and -z defaultextract enable you to toggle the archive extraction mechanism among multiple archives.

With selective archive extraction, the link-editor makes multiple passes through an archive. Relocatable objects are extracted as needed to satisfy the symbol information being accumulated in the link-editor internal symbol table. After the link-editor has made a complete pass through the archive without extracting any relocatable objects, the next input file is processed.

By extracting only the relocatable objects needed when an archive is encountered, the position of the archive on the command line can be significant. See Position of an Archive on the Command Line.

Although the link-editor makes multiple passes through an archive to resolve symbols, this mechanism can be quite costly. Especially, for large archives that contain random organizations of relocatable objects. In these cases, you should use tools like lorder(1) and tsort(1) to order the relocatable objects within the archive. This ordering reduces the number of passes the link-editor must carry out.