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

I had the same issue myself, but using MinGW's GCC implementation - stripping the executable and passing the -Qn option did nothing, and I couldn't remove the ".comment" section as there wasn't one.

In order to stop the compiler including this information, regardless of which sections are in your executable, you can pass the -fno-ident parameter to the compiler and linker:

Without the parameter (strings -a [filename]):

!This program cannot be run in DOS mode.
.text
0`.rdata
0@.idata
GCC: (tdm64-2) 4.8.1

With the parameter:

!This program cannot be run in DOS mode.
.text
0`.idata