A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux

(or, "Size Is Everything")

She studied it carefully for about 15 minutes. Finally, she spoke. "There's something written on here," she said, frowning, "but it's really teensy."

[Dave Barry, "The Columnist's Caper"]

If you're a programmer who's become fed up with software bloat, then may you find herein the perfect antidote.

This document explores methods for squeezing excess bytes out of simple programs. (Of course, the more practical purpose of this document is to describe a few of the inner workings of the ELF file format and the Linux operating system. But hopefully you can also learn something about how to make really teensy ELF executables in the process.)

Please note that the information and examples given here are, for the most part, specific to ELF executables on a Linux platform running under an Intel-386 architecture. I imagine that a good bit of the information is applicable to other ELF-based Unices, but my experiences with such are too limited for me to say with certainty.

Please also note that if you aren't a little bit familiar with assembly code, you may find parts of this document sort of hard to follow. (The assembly code that appears in this document is written using Nasm; see .)