Programming

Hi,

Any one pls let me know the difference amoung .a .o and .so in AIX environment.

Thanks,
Naga

.o file - the unlinked output of the compiler - an object file

.a - out of using ar to "pack" several .o files into an object archive file. It is an efficient way of keeping track of and being able to access object modules during the link edit phase of compilation.

.so - shared object library - created by the linker from .o files. These shared libraries
are loaded into memory and accessed (all at one time) by lots of processes in the system. This saves memory.

And we do not do homework here, but it was hard for me to tell on this question.

Thanks Jim for your prompt reply. Now it's cleared.

-Naga

Another way of reasoning about the differences is that .a files are linked in at compile time and .so files are linked in at run time.

So when you compile a source file that calls functions in a .a file the code for those functions gets included, but when you call functions in a .so file they get included when you run the program.