ar thin archive format

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 1:58 AM, Tamar Christina <tamar@zhox.com> wrote:
>
> I'm trying to find information on the format of thin archives but can't seem to find anything and
> Objdump doesn't recognize the format.
>
> Does someone know If this exists or where I should look in the code for the=
>  implementation?

A thin archive looks exactly look a normal archive, except that the
magic string is different (it's !<thin>\n) and the file contents are
omitted.  The idea is that you look at the archive header to find the
file name (probably an extended name, of course) and then read the
file in the file system.

Cary introduced them in
https://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2008-03/msg00150.html .

Ian