Turning dynamic into static?

Lawrence R. Rogers (lrr@cert.org)
Thu, 9 Nov 1995 08:10:32 -0500

Speaking of shared object libraries and dynamic linking, is it possible to
turned a dynamically linked program into a static one with ld, ld.so, whatever?

If possible, Sun could distributed /usr/bin/login as a dynamically linked program and those who wish could make it static.

Consider the sysadmin who needs a set of known tools that they can carry around on a floppy, tools like ps, netstat, ifconfig, etc.  Those tools would be imune to various types of corruption of a system, changes to shared object libraries for example.  Sure, one could fetch GNU tools and build them statically but the vendor's tools may be preferrable.

Thanks for your thoughts.
--

                                        Larry Rogers
                                        Member, Technical Staff
                                        Trustworthy Systems
                                        Software Engineering Institute
                                        Carnegie-Mellon University
                                        Pittsburgh, PA 15213
                                        lrr@cert.org
                                        lrr@sei.cmu.edu