elfref - a tool to dump references in an ELF file

As an excercise in Linux system programming in C, I wrote a tool called elfref that helps to debug customer’s linking issues. Given an ELF file, it interprets all the relocation records and prints out everything that functions or data refer to. For instance, this output means that that the function main() refers to the function process_args():

$ elfref a.o 
elfref: Input (a.o) is a 64-bit little endian ELF relocatable file.
main (addr 0x00000000)
	(+0x001c)-> process_args()-4

This information comes in handy when a customer complains about a link failure and all you’ve given in the name of the missing symbol. elfref will help to locate the point in source code where that unsatisfied reference is made.

Full source code can be found on github.