a.out

E299176

a.out is an older executable and object file format historically used on Unix systems before being largely superseded by formats like ELF.

All labels observed (1)

Label Occurrences
a.out canonical 3

How this entity was disambiguated

Statements (49)

Predicate Object
instanceOf binary file format
executable file format
object file format
category Unix binary format
linker output format
defaultOutputNameOf Unix C compiler
cc
early gcc
designedFor statically linked executables
fileExtension .out
hasHeaderField bss segment size
data segment offset
data segment size
entry point
magic number
relocation info offset
string table offset
symbol table offset
symbol table size
text segment offset
text segment size
hasVariant NMAGIC
OMAGIC
QMAGIC
ZMAGIC
historicalRole standard Unix executable format before ELF
introducedIn early Unix versions
limitation architecture-specific layout
limited extensibility
poor support for shared libraries
nameOrigin assembler output
status legacy
stillSupportedBy some BSD systems (for compatibility)
supersededBy COFF
ELF
supportsFeature relocation information
symbol table
supportsSegment bss segment
data segment
text segment
usedOn FreeBSD
MINIX operating system
surface form: Minix

NeXTSTEP
surface form: NEXTSTEP

NetBSD
OpenBSD
SunOS
Unix
early BSD Unix
early Linux

How these facts were elicited

Referenced by (3)

Full triples — surface form annotated when it differs from this entity's canonical label.

GNU As supportsFormat a.out
ELF predecessor a.out