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

In the GNU compilation environment you can look with objdump both in the executable and in the object file.

As you can see the object contains only the code of functions declared/referenced within the compiled file (the file contains only the main function with a scanf call and a printf call).

$ objdump -t scanf_sample.o

scanf_sample.o:     file format pe-i386

SYMBOL TABLE:
[  0](sec -2)(fl 0x00)(ty   0)(scl 103) (nx 1) 0x00000000 scanf_sample.c
File
[  2](sec  1)(fl 0x00)(ty  20)(scl   2) (nx 0) 0x00000000 _main
[  3](sec  1)(fl 0x00)(ty   0)(scl   3) (nx 1) 0x00000000 .text
AUX scnlen 0x91 nreloc 9 nlnno 0
[  5](sec  2)(fl 0x00)(ty   0)(scl   3) (nx 1) 0x00000000 .data
AUX scnlen 0x0 nreloc 0 nlnno 0
[  7](sec  3)(fl 0x00)(ty   0)(scl   3) (nx 1) 0x00000000 .bss
AUX scnlen 0x0 nreloc 0 nlnno 0
[  9](sec  4)(fl 0x00)(ty   0)(scl   3) (nx 1) 0x00000000 .rdata
AUX scnlen 0x54 nreloc 0 nlnno 0
[ 11](sec  0)(fl 0x00)(ty  20)(scl   2) (nx 1) 0x00000000 ___main
AUX tagndx 0 ttlsiz 0x0 lnnos 0 next 0
[ 13](sec  0)(fl 0x00)(ty   0)(scl   2) (nx 0) 0x00000000 __alloca
[ 14](sec  0)(fl 0x00)(ty  20)(scl   2) (nx 0) 0x00000000 _memset
[ 15](sec  0)(fl 0x00)(ty  20)(scl   2) (nx 0) 0x00000000 _scanf
[ 16](sec  0)(fl 0x00)(ty  20)(scl   2) (nx 0) 0x00000000 _printf

If you use objdump on an executable you can see a lot more functions (besides those found inside the object). This proves that the object file contains only the functions defined in the source file with references to other functions. Those references will be resolved at linking phase.

Read more about linking, compilation and objects.

Answer 2

The file contains binary data which must be run through a linker to generate an executable. It is essentially a bunch of machine code instructions with named sections (corresponding to your functions). From wikipedia's 'Object File' article:

In computer science, an object file is an organized collection of separate, named sequences of machine code[citation needed]. Each sequence, or object, typically contains instructions for the host machine to accomplish some task, possibly accompanied by related data and metadata (e.g. relocation information, stack unwinding information, comments, program symbols, debugging or profiling information). A linker is typically used to generate an executable or library by combining parts of object files.