Distinguishing debug from optimized libs and executables

Question

I'm looking for a way to programmatically distinguish debug libs and executables from their optimized counterparts. It needs to be a way to, for example, parse the output of some utility that can produce information which distinguishes debug from optimized libs or executables.
I've looked at the system utilities nm, dump, and elfdump, but there is no documentation that describes how the information produced by these utilities might differ between debug and optimized code.
There are tantalizing hints in the on-line help here on the Sun site that the utility dumpstabs might provide this functionality, but that utility isn't available to me. Also, the version of nm that ships with RedHat7.2 claims to dump debug symbols only when used with a certain flag, so perhaps nm could be adapted to my needs, but I don't know how. If there is a way to parse the output of nm to distinguish debug from optimized libs and execs, could someone enlighten me?
Thanks,
Derrell

Answer 1

There is no easy way to do this - a symbol is a symbol. But if you are using file static symbols in the libraries, you are in luck.
Note, a file static symbol is like this:
foo.c:
static int foo_cnt = 100;
Given the fact our compilers would globalize the names of these symbols with the "$" prefix. It would be something like "$XAu8kkBEoje_yEX.foo_cnt" for the above symbol. Thus if you can find such names, it's safe to say the library was built with debug info.
If you only use global symbols and functions, well then I don't see how to tell these libraries apart.
- Rose