Re: Readelf vs objdump

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Hans-Peter Nilsson wrote:

> On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Stan Shebs wrote:
>
> > While it seems like an obvious thing to hack up the dwarf dumping code so
> > that it can be used in objdump for non-ELF, it makes me wonder why there
> > is a
> > separate readelf program in the first place.  Is this just historical, or is
> > there a fundamental reason why binutils has two file dumpers?
>
> While Daniel answered the question IMHO perfectly, I can't help
> but wonder where this should be documented; it comes up now and
> then.  (I assume it isn't documented, or Stan would know.)
> Stan, where would/did you look for the answer to this question
> (documentation-wise)?
Top of readelf.c seems like one obvious place. The user manual ought
to say something too, otherwise how does the user know which to prefer
for what purpose? All I saw was a rather coy xref from objdump -g to
readelf -w.

Stan