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objcopy -j -O binary can't extract debug sections

Ian Lance Taylor iant@google.com
Fri Nov 22 20:26:00 GMT 2013 
On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 10:40 AM, Corinna Vinschen <vinschen@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Here's the start of the script:
>
>   EXE=$1
>   LONGSECTIONS=".gnu_debuglink \
>                 .debug_aranges \
>                 .debug_info \
>                 .debug_abbrev \
>                 .debug_line \
>                 .debug_frame \
>                 .debug_str \
>                 .debug_loc \
>                 .debug_ranges"
>
>   for section in ${LONGSECTIONS}
>   do
>     objcopy -j "${section}" -O binary "${EXE}" "${EXE}${section}"
>     objcopy -R "${section}" "${EXE}"
>   done
>   [...]
>
> So I'm just storing the binary content of the debug sections in separate
> files and then strip the section from the executable.
>
> The problem is, it doesn't work.  The only section which I can export
> successfully this way is the .gnu_debuglink section.  All the files
> supposed to contain the Dwarf2 debug sections will have a length of 0.
> No errors, no warnings, just a size of 0.

It's because the .debug_XXX sections are marked with SEC_DEBUG in BFD,
and the BFD "binary" format discards SEC_DEBUG sections.

Try adding
    --set-section-flags=".debug*=alloc,load"

Ian
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