following up a message from Roy J. Tellason to andrew clarke:

 RJT> andrew clarke wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 ac> Mon 2003-06-16 04:06, Roy J. Tellason (1:270/615) wrote to Wes
 ac> Garland: 

 RJT> I have a book on c programming around here someplace that actually
 RJT> talks about dealing with c under the unix environment,  and that's
 RJT> where I'd heard of a.out in the first place.  Dunno where that book
 RJT> is,  offhand,  though.

 ac> Possibly "A Book On C" by Kelley/Pohl...

 RJT> I was thinking that the ELF binary thing sorta obsoleted that,  but
 RJT> I guess I still have a lot to learn about doing things on that
 RJT> platform.

 ac> FreeBSD moved from "a.out" format to ELF format in version 3.0, but
 ac> gcc still outputs files named a.out (unless you use the -o option)
 ac> presumably not to break old Makefiles/build systems, etc.

 RJT> So it's already in that format?  (Looking...)  Damn,  so it is! 
 RJT> Right there near the start of the file,  I see "ELF".  Hmm.  Guess
 RJT> I gotta play with these tools a bit more,  get to know them
 RJT> better.  :-)

...including how to get a bunch of what appears to be debugging crap out of
the file.  -O3 gave me 15k instead of 18k,  but anyway.

Renamed it,  moved it to bin,  and tested it,  then let it rip.  On a
directory containing some 860+ files,  it was all over in a matter of
seconds,  maybe 3 seconds or so tops.  Whee!  And it worked well,  too.

Probably we oughta continue this elsewhere if you want,  like C_ECHO or
someplace,  since we're kinda drifting off the topic here. 

---