The Computer Oracle

How to list imported symbols in ELF executable?

--------------------------------------------------
Become or hire the top 3% of the developers on Toptal https://topt.al/25cXVn
--------------------------------------------------

Music by Eric Matyas
https://www.soundimage.org
Track title: Flying Over Ancient Lands

--

Chapters
00:00 Question
00:29 Accepted answer (Score 25)
00:40 Answer 2 (Score 9)
01:14 Answer 3 (Score 5)
01:28 Answer 4 (Score 2)
02:02 Thank you

--

Full question
https://superuser.com/questions/161722/h...

--

Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...

--

Tags
#linux #compile

#avk47



ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 27


Try objdump -T 'ELF-file'




ANSWER 2

Score 9


The output from objdump is a little excessive for this purpose, and requires a good bit of parsing to find the actual imports.

I prefer readelf for this purpose:

readelf -d dynamic-buffer-test

Dynamic section at offset 0x630a8 contains 23 entries:
 Tag                Type                 Name/Value
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libstdc++.so.6]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libm.so.6]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libc.so.6]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libgcc_s.so.1]

As you can see, the required libraries are marked with "NEEDED".




ANSWER 3

Score 6


I prefer readelf.

readelf -s <file>




ANSWER 4

Score 2


Along with the other answers posted here I would like to propose another. The contents printed are a function of the file format, where ELF lends itself nicely to solving this problem.

objdump -p /path/to/binary | grep NEEDED

The grep simply extracts the contents of the Dynamic Section, but its the format of the objdump -p output that makes this a simple solution.