Next: typedef asymbol, Previous: Writing Symbols, Up: Symbols [Contents][Index]

#### 2.7.3 Mini Symbols

Mini symbols provide read-only access to the symbol table. They use less memory space, but require more time to access. They can be useful for tools like nm or objdump, which may have to handle symbol tables of extremely large executables.

The `bfd_read_minisymbols` function will read the symbols into memory in an internal form. It will return a `void *` pointer to a block of memory, a symbol count, and the size of each symbol. The pointer is allocated using `malloc`, and should be freed by the caller when it is no longer needed.

The function `bfd_minisymbol_to_symbol` will take a pointer to a minisymbol, and a pointer to a structure returned by `bfd_make_empty_symbol`, and return a `asymbol` structure. The return value may or may not be the same as the value from `bfd_make_empty_symbol` which was passed in.