[Chapter 24] 24.13 Save Space in Executable Files with strip
Author: Jerry Peek, Tim O'Reilly & Mike Loukides
Date: 1998-08-04T21:41:42Z

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| Chapter 24 Other Ways to Get Disk Space |

## 24.13 Save Space in Executable Files with strip

Warning! | After you compile (52.8) and debug a program, there's a part of the executable binary that you can delete to save disk space. The strip command does the job. Note that once you strip a file, you can't use a symbolic debugger like dbx on it!

Here's an example. I'll compile a C program and list it. Then I'll strip it and list it again. How much space you save depends on several factors, but you'll almost always save something.

    -s
    % cc -o echoerr echoerr.c
    % ls -ls echoerr
      52 -rwxr-xr-x   1 jerry    24706 Nov 18 15:49 echoerr
    % strip echoerr
    % ls -ls echoerr
      36 -rwxr-xr-x   1 jerry    16656 Nov 18 15:49 echoerr

If you know that you want a file stripped when you compile it, use cc with its -s option. If you use ld-say, in a makefile (28.13)- use the -s option there.

Here's a shell script named stripper that finds all the unstripped executable files in your bin directory (4.2) and strips them. It's a quick way to save space on your account. (The same script, searching the whole filesystem, will save even more space for system administrators - but watch out for unusual filenames (9.22)):

    xargs
    #! /bin/sh
    skipug="! -perm -4000 ! -perm -2000"  # SKIP SETUID, SETGID FILES
    find $HOME/bin -type f \( -perm -0100 $skipug \) -print |
    xargs file |
    sed -n '/executable .*not stripped/s/:[TAB].*//p' |
    xargs -t strip

The find (17.2) finds all executable files that aren't setuid or setgid (24.14) and runs file (25.8) to get a description of each. The sed command skips shell scripts and other files that can't be stripped. sed searches for lines from file like:

>     /usr/local/bin/xemacs:[TAB]xxx... executable xxx... not stripped

with the word "executable" followed by "not stripped"-sed removes the colon, tab, and description, then passes the filename to strip.

- JP

24.12 Compressing a Directory Tree: Fine-Tuning |  | 24.14 Don't Use strip Carelessly