I'm clueless

[Kevin Buettner]

On Apr 11,  1:25am, Kevin Brown wrote:

> Ok, with some help (thanks Patrick) I was able to get past a few
> problems in trying to get a program to compile.  I was able to
> connect to the CVS server for this packet sniffing program.  For the
> past two days I've tried to figure this out to no avail.  I tried
> searching Altavista and Google for similar errors to see what fixes
> were tried.  No go, so ...
> 
> libEQ.a: could not read symbols: File format not recognized
> collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
> make[2]: *** [showeq] Error 1
> make[2]: Leaving directory `/tmp/showeq-2.1.2/src'
> make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
> make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/showeq-2.1.2'
> make: *** [all-recursive-am] Error 2
> 
> I tried redownloading both the tar.gz file (since one of the
> developers noticed a problem if Winzip was used) and the cvs version
> (to different directories) and both end with this error.  The file
> is present, it is not in source format, just the archive format (I
> think that is what .a files are).  So..., Any clue.

Here are my guesses:

  1) libEQ.a is an archive library for a different architecture than
     what you are building on.

  2) libEQ.a is corrupt.

You might try listing the archive library with the ar program to see
what's in it.  That'll give you some indication if it's corrupt or not.
Use the following command:

    ar t libEQ.a

If the above command produces a list of .o files, then try the following:

    ar x libEQ.a foo.o

where foo.o is one of the object files from the above list.

Now run ``file'' on the extracted file:

    file foo.o

It should produce output something like this...

    foo.o: ELF 32-bit LSB relocatable, Intel 80386, version 1, not stripped

If it says it's stripped, that's no good since you need symbols to do the
linking.

If the architecture doesn't match the one you're building on, that won't
work either since you need to link object files together which've been
compiled for the same architecture.

Hope this helps,

Kevin

-- 
Kevin Buettner
kev@primenet.com, kevinb@redhat.com