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Ruby-Elf

Ruby-Elf is a pure-Ruby library for parse and fetch information about ELF format used by Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and other Unix-like operating systems, and include a set of analysis tools helpful for both optimisations and verification of compiled ELF files.

The library allows access to all the details of the ELF files (class, type, architecture OS), and also implements Ruby-style access to the most important sections in ELF files, such as symbol and string tables, as well as dynamic information. Furthermore it implements support for accessing extensions specifics for instance to the GNU loader such as symbol version information.

Tools

To complement the library raw access, the project also ships with a number of tools, designed to analyse compiled code, in either relocated object or final (executable or shared object) form. These include both optimisation and verification tools:

  • cowstats: allows identification and assessment of CoW data objects inside ELF relocatable files. Should be used to reduce the memory impact of a shared library used by many processes on the system.

  • rbelf-size: implements an alternative approach for the size command available on standard Unix systems (as provided by binutils or elfutils packages in most Linux distributions), that focus more on relocation caused by PIC than the actual shared memory sizes.

  • rbelf-nm: implements a quasi-compatible nm(1) command, more resilient than GNU nm and more informative than the elfutils variant.

  • verify-lfs: checks executables and shared objects, or alternatively relocatable object files, for LFS compliancy, reporting those that don't make use of the largefile-compatible interfaces or that mix old and new ones.

  • elfgrep: looks for defined or required symbols in dynamic executables and shared objects, with a command syntax similar to the standard grep tool.

License

Due to derivation, library and tools are released under the GNU GPL-2 license, or later. See the COPYING file for the complete text.

Resources

You can find the source code for the package at GitHub.