abidw

abidw reads a shared library in ELF format and emits an XML representation of its ABI to standard output. The emitted representation includes all the globally defined functions and variables, along with a complete representation of their types. It also includes a representation of the globally defined ELF symbols of the file. The input shared library must contain associated debug information in DWARF format.

Invocation

abidw [options] [<path-to-elf-file>]

Options

  • --help

    Display a short help about the command and exit.

  • --debug-info-dir <dir-path>

    In cases where the debug info for path-to-elf-file is in a separate file that is located in a non-standard place, this tells abidw where to look for that debug info file.

    Note that dir-path must point to the root directory under which the debug information is arranged in a tree-like manner. Under Red Hat based systems, that directory is usually <root>/usr/lib/debug.

    Note that this option is not mandatory for split debug information installed by your system’s package manager because then abidw knows where to find it.

  • --out-file <file-path>

    This option instructs abidw to emit the XML representation of path-to-elf-file into the file file-path, rather than emitting it to its standard output.

  • --check-alternate-debug-info <elf-path>

    If the debug info for the file elf-path contains a reference to an alternate debug info file, abidw checks that it can find that alternate debug info file. In that case, it emits a meaningful success message mentioning the full path to the alternate debug info file found. Otherwise, it emits an error code.

  • --check-alternate-debug-info-base-name <elf-path>

    Like --check-alternate-debug-info, but in the success message, only mention the base name of the debug info file; not its full path.

  • --load-all-types

    By default, libabigail (and thus abidw) only loads types that are reachable from functions and variables declarations that are publicly defined and exported by the binary. So only those types are present in the output of abidw. This option however makes abidw load all the types defined in the binaries, even those that are not reachable from public declarations.

Notes

Alternate debug info files

As of the version 4 of the DWARF specification, Alternate debug information is a GNU extension to the DWARF specification. It has however been proposed for inclusion into the upcoming version 5 of the DWARF standard. You can read more about the GNU extensions to the DWARF standard here.

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