Why does the compiler version appear in my ELF executable?

Question

I\'ve recently compiled a simple hello world C program under Debian Linux using gcc:

gcc -mtune=native -march=native -m32 -s -Wunused -O2 -o hello hello.c
         


        

Answer 1

That's in a comment section in the ELF binary. You can strip it out:

$ gcc -m32 -O2 -s -o t t.c
$ ls -l t
-rwxr-xr-x 1 me users 5488 Jun  7 11:58 t
$ readelf -p .comment t

String dump of section '.comment':
  [     0]  GCC: (Gentoo 4.5.1-r1 p1.4, pie-0.4.5) 4.5.1
  [    2d]  GCC: (Gentoo 4.5.2 p1.1, pie-0.4.5) 4.5.2


$ strip -R .comment t


$ readelf -p .comment t
readelf: Warning: Section '.comment' was not dumped because it does not exist!
$ ls -l t
-rwxr-xr-x 1 me users 5352 Jun  7 11:58 t

The gains are tiny though, not sure it's worth it.