linuxshellelfbinutils

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

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?

Solution

  • Rather inelegant hack around objdump and dd:

    IN_F=/bin/echo
OUT_F=./tmp1.bin
SECTION=.text

objdump -h $IN_F |
  grep $SECTION |
  awk '{print "dd if='$IN_F' of='$OUT_F' bs=1 count=$[0x" $3 "] skip=$[0x" $6 "]"}' |
  bash

    The objdump -h produces predictable output which contains section offset in the elf file. I made the awk to generate a dd command for the shell, since dd doesn't support hexadecimal numbers. And fed the command to shell.

    In past I did all that manually, without making any scripts, since it is rarely needed.