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.

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

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