How can I examine contents of a data section of an ELF file on Linux?

Question

I\'ve been using objdump to look at assembly code in Linux ELF binaries.

Sometimes there is an indirect jump through a jump table that is stored in the

Answer 1

You can get the RAW (not hexdump-ed) ELF section with:

# To a file:
objcopy file /dev/null --dump-section .text=text.data
# To stdout:
objcopy file /dev/null --dump-section .text=/dev/stdout | cat

Here I'm using | cat in order to force stdout to be a pipe. /dev/stdout might work unexpectedly if stdout is a file. .text=- does not send to stdout but to the - file.

However objcopy and objdump have some deficiencies (because they are based on BFD which abstracts different executable formats).

Update: I wrote a tool to do this which does not rely on BFD.