It seems that earlier developers to save effort on there end included all libraries within our project workspace which would be around 500. Now we are coding a separate test module which includes some objects referenced in the makefile. We created a new makefile for same and inclusion of some libraries for generating binary is giving hundreds of 'undefined reference' symbol error.

Are you using GNU Make? It has some tools builtin to find your dependencies, build static dependency files, and copious debug output. You can use these to achieve your goals.

Though we are not using GNU make, but right now we are in dead need to know that amongst the 500 libraries if I using some of them then what are the others which I can remove from my new makefile.

Please provide some reference for same.

Here is a genetic way of doing it

Use the nm utility to ouput the symbol table for your application. A 'T' in the second column indicates a function that is either defined in your source code or comes from a static library. A 'U' in the second column indicates a function that is included via a shared library. You then need to massage that list (listA) to remove all the functions that are defined within your source code.

Next write a script to nm each of your 500 libraries and construct a sorted list (listB) of library + function names.

Finally write a script which uses listB to update listA by adding a column containing the name of the library where that function is defined.

At this stage you should have a list of all the external functions used by your application together with the name of library which defined the function.

It is then a trivial exercise to figure out which libraries are not needed by the application.

Thanks a lot. We do need one automated script that would do this all.

I don't think that trial/error would be so tough. In pseudo perl code:

my @all_libs  = split (/\s+/, `ls $LIBPATH/*.a`);
my $good_libs = "";

# get number of unresolved messages w/o any static lib:
my $n_symbols = `make target | grep 'unresolved' | wc -l`;
chomp ($n_symbols);

foreach my $lib ( @all_libs )
{
  # try to add that static lib, and see if the number of unresolved syms decreases

  $lib =~ s/^lib//;
  $lib =~ s/\.a$//;
  
  my $check = `/bin/env LDFLAGS=-l$lib make target | grep 'unresolved' | wc -l`;
  chomp ($check);

  if ( $check < $n_symbols )
  {
     # good lib, well done!
     $good_libs .= " -l$lib");
  }    
}

# we want to link against all good libs
print "$good_libs\n";