How do I find where a symbol is defined among static libraries

Question

Suppose you work with a codebase comprising several tools and libraries and you want to port (or resurrect) some component within such codebase but any clue about where symbols

Answer 1

Using nm's --defined-only switch is helpful here since it will remove the undefined references. Below is a csh script that may be useful to others.

#!/bin/csh
#
#recurse from current dir and output name of any .a files
#that contain the desired symbol.
echo "Search for: $1"
foreach i (`find . -name '*.a'`)
    nm --defined-only $i | grep $1
    if ($status == 0) then
        echo $i
    endif
end