03-20-2006
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Join Date: Aug 2001
Last Activity: 26 February 2016, 12:31 PM EST
Location: Ashburn, Virginia
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There is a program called "what" that will look inside executables and look for strings that have @(#) in them and display these strings. So originally you would do stuff like:
char ident[] = "@(#) something goes here";
to leave data for "what" to find. This means that string is part of your program and consumes space. When the new format for object files called elf came out, it had support for this stuff in the format. It's a special segment that exists in the file but is not loaded when the program runs. Compilers written by people who think standards are a good thing have a pragma to access this:
#pragma ident "@(#) something goes here"
From what you say, I guess that there is a compiler with a non-standard preprocessing directive.
In a shell script, it would just be a comment. With the @(#), "what" will still find it.
These "what strings" are often generated automatically by SCCS or RCS or CVS or similiar packages.
