What does an object file contain?

Question

During the various stages of compilation in C or C++, I know that an object file gets generated (i.e., any_name.o file). What does this .o file contain? I can\'t open it sin

Answer 1

The object file is the compiled source.

This means that it's machine code, which is dependent on the target platform (you can compile for Unix on Windows if you really want to) and the compiler used. Different compilers will produce different machine code from the same source file.