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Input section basics
An input section description consists of a file name optionally followed
by a list of section names in parentheses.
The file name and the section name may be wildcard patterns, which we
describe further below (see Input Section Wildcards).
The most common input section description is to include all input
sections with a particular name in the output section. For example, to
include all input .text sections, you would write:
*(.text)
Here the * is a wildcard which matches any file name. To exclude a list
of files from matching the file name wildcard, EXCLUDE_FILE may be used to
match all files except the ones specified in the EXCLUDE_FILE list. For
example:
(*(EXCLUDE_FILE (*crtend.o *otherfile.o) .ctors))
will cause all .ctors sections from all files except crtend.o and
otherfile.o to be included.
There are two ways to include more than one section:
*(.text .rdata)
*(.text) *(.rdata)
The difference between these is the order in which the .text and
.rdata input sections will appear in the output section. In the
first example, they will be intermingled, appearing in the same order as
they are found in the linker input. In the second example, all
.text input sections will appear first, followed by all
.rdata input sections.
You can specify a file name to include sections from a particular file.
You would do this if one or more of your files contain special data that
needs to be at a particular location in memory. For example:
data.o(.data)
If you use a file name without a list of sections, then all sections in
the input file will be included in the output section. This is not
commonly done, but it may by useful on occasion. For example:
data.o
When you use a file name which does not contain any wild card
characters, the linker will first see if you also specified the file
name on the linker command line or in an INPUT command. If you
did not, the linker will attempt to open the file as an input file, as
though it appeared on the command line. Note that this differs from an
INPUT command, because the linker will not search for the file in
the archive search path.
