The link-editor performs many operations including the opening of files and the concatenation of sections from these files. Monitoring, and sometimes modifying, these operations can often be beneficial to components of a compilation system.
This section describes the ld-support interface. This interface provides for input file inspection, and to some degree, input file data modification of those files that compose a link-edit. Two applications that employ this interface are the link-editor and the make(1S) utility. The link editor uses the interface to process debugging information within relocatable objects. The make utility uses the interface to save state information.
The ld-support interface is composed of a support library that offers one or more support interface routines. This library is loaded as part of the link-edit process. Any support routines that are found in the library are called at various stages of link-editing.
You should be familiar with the elf(3ELF) structures and file format when using this interface.