Readelf vs objdump

[Stan Shebs]

Hans-Peter Nilsson wrote:

>On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Stan Shebs wrote:
>
>>While it seems like an obvious thing to hack up the dwarf dumping code so
>>that it can be used in objdump for non-ELF, it makes me wonder why there
>>is a
>>separate readelf program in the first place.  Is this just historical, or is
>>there a fundamental reason why binutils has two file dumpers?
>>
>
>While Daniel answered the question IMHO perfectly, I can't help
>but wonder where this should be documented; it comes up now and
>then.  (I assume it isn't documented, or Stan would know.)
>Stan, where would/did you look for the answer to this question
>(documentation-wise)?
>
Top of readelf.c seems like one obvious place. The user manual ought
to say something too, otherwise how does the user know which to prefer
for what purpose? All I saw was a rather coy xref from objdump -g to
readelf -w.

Stan