CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++clinuxdebugging
VoidPointer
VoidPointer

Reputation: 3097

how to know if a binary contains debugging symbols or not without file, objdump or gdb?

I need to know whether a binary has debugging symbols in it or not. Its a production system and so doesnt have commands like file or objdump or gdb.

Can provide more info when needed.

OS: Debian

Upvotes: 12

Views: 12367

Answers (3)

Tomer W
Tomer W

Reputation: 3443

Best of all, Take some tools with you!

if you cant, then you should know the format of the Binary, on Linux Systems, it is ELF... you can check to find sections such as .symtab or .debug_.
if they exists, you have all the symbols in your binaries.

another idea, is to plant some symbol (e.g. my_check_symbol_to_see) then grep this symbol...

Upvotes: 2

asio_guy
asio_guy

Reputation: 3767

probably you are looking for a tool like objdump

Lets say we have a small program like this

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
    printf("Hello ");
    return 0;
}

compile normally now

gcc example.c -o example

now lets check presence of debugging symbols using objdump tool

objdump -h example | grep debug

we won't find any of course

now lets try again by compiling with debug options

gcc -g example.c -o example
objdump -h example | grep debug
 26 .debug_aranges 00000030  0000000000000000  0000000000000000  000008b0  2**0
 27 .debug_pubnames 0000001b  0000000000000000  0000000000000000  000008e0  2**0
 28 .debug_info   0000008b  0000000000000000  0000000000000000  000008fb  2**0
 29 .debug_abbrev 0000003f  0000000000000000  0000000000000000  00000986  2**0
 30 .debug_line   0000003f  0000000000000000  0000000000000000  000009c5  2**0
 31 .debug_str    00000087  0000000000000000  0000000000000000  00000a04  2**0
 32 .debug_pubtypes 00000012  0000000000000000  0000000000000000  00000a8b  2**0

man -a objdump might help a lot more

Upvotes: 12

Mats Petersson
Mats Petersson

Reputation: 129374

The easy solution, if you don't know if the binary has symbols or not and there are no tools on the actual machine you have the binary on, is to use something like scp (secure remote copy) to copy the file to a machine that has tools.

As the other comment says, using the strings command, which prints anything it finds that "looks like a string" (a long enough sequence of "printable" characters), but it's not quite as reliable, as you never really know what the debug symbols look like, and you can get false positives from code containing symbols from macros etc.

Upvotes: 2

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