Utility to determine if ELF binary is built with debug sections

elfdbg

About

This project elfdbg is a utility program to quickly identify if an ELF binary is built with debug sections

Debug sections in ELF binary usually are generated using the -g flag with the compiler. The compiler adds the new .debug_* sections in the binary.

The program is looking for the existence of sections with name starting with .debug_ to determine if the binary has been built with debug information.

The ELF format is a well-known standard. ELF TIS reference specification is available here and as a FreeBSD elf(5) man page.

Usage

This is intented to be used in shell script in order to avoid using file(1) and parsing the output like below:

`file /path/to/binary | awk '/debug_info/{print $2}'` != 'ELF'

To determine if binary has been built with debug, use the following:

if elfdbg -q /path/to/binary; then
        echo "No symbols"
    else
        echo "Binary with debug symbols"
fi

On FreeBSD, you can easily identify the binary packages with missing debug using similar one-liner:

pkg info -a -l|grep local/bin/|while read a; do echo $a: `elfdbg $a`; done

Build and install

The Makefile use the standard BSD Makefile to build the program.

make && sudo make install

If your on Linux, use make -f GNUMakefile to specify the GNU Makefile.

Test

The tests cases are implemented using the FreeBSD test suite framework with kyua and Kyuafile .

make test

History

• 2015 I wrote this using libelf elf(3) and gelf(3) API f4b470b
• 2020 I rewrote this without relying on libelf API 1960d10