How to extract only the raw contents of an ELF section?

linux shell elf binutils
mepcotterell picture mepcotterell · Oct 13, 2010 · Viewed 37.6k times · Source

I've tried the following, but the resulting file is still an ELF and not purely the section content.

$ objcopy --only-section=<name> <infile> <outfile>

I just want the contents of the section. Is there any utility that can do this? Any ideas?

Answer

ndim picture ndim · Oct 13, 2010

Use the -O binary output format:

objcopy -O binary --only-section=.text foobar.elf foobar.text

Just verified with avr-objcopy and an AVR ELF image's .text section.

Note that if, as Tim points out below, your section doesn't have the ALLOC flag, you may have to add --set-section-flags .text=alloc to be able to extract it.

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