Date: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 15:16:10 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: Balea Mihai Sorin <sorinb AT sky DOT dsp DOT pub DOT ro>
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Re: Weird stuff in COFF files


On Fri, 27 Oct 1995, Balea Mihai Sorin wrote:

>   I was playing around with djgpp 1.12m4 ( gcc 2.6.3 ) when I noticed something
> quite strange. The resulting COFF file was different, although I compiled the
> same source file ( about 30 lines long ) under *the same* conditions ( meaning
> the same command line and the same environment ).Further browsing of the output
> revealed even stranger things. The end of COFF file was filled with a lot of 
> apparently unnecessary stuff like functions identifiers and assembly labels.
> Even worse : in some cases I found a partial copy of my directory tree and/or
> pieces of C source. Worth mentioning : my program behaves identically each time
> I build it. And also, I did not include any debug info !

The identifiers from your program are the debugging info.  You can strip 
them (and make the image slimmer) with the strip.exe program, like this:

	strip myprog
	coff2exe myprog

The parts which seem like a directory structure are just a slack space 
which DJGPP uses to make your image size a multiple of 4KB (presumably it 
would then load faster).  It is just filled with the first available 
junk, so you don't have to worry about that.