Talk:nm (Unix)

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Nm (UNIX) survived vfd. See: talk:Nm (UNIX)/Delete. Wile E. Heresiarch 02:11, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

What does nm stand for? --Abdull (talk) 09:58, 29 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I always assumed "name" or "names", as in "list the names in this object file". JöG (talk) 22:01, 4 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe "name mangling" according to its use, but shortname for "name" also fits (similar in construction to mv, cp, ls and ln). Choose your best mnemonics. Teuxe (talk) 12:37, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I am removing the part of the article which goes:

As with other parts of the GNU toolchain, a given nm binary is compiled only for a specific computer architecture and binary format, and so security specialists who use nm to examine suspect binary files typically keep a number of "foreign target" nm binaries prebuilt.

because it is provably false. I could use an x86-64 nm on these ELF files for three different architectures:

foo.o:      ELF 32-bit MSB relocatable, SPARC, version 1 (SYSV), not stripped
motorola.o: ELF 32-bit MSB relocatable, PowerPC or cisco 4500, version 1 (SYSV), not stripped
bar.o:      ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable, AMD x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), not stripped

JöG (talk) 22:01, 4 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Since it is the decoding of a file content and no code execution is involved, you're totally right as long as the command implementation knows the binary file format. Teuxe (talk) 12:40, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]