Re: "a.out"

[kai@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen)]

malc@thing.demon.co.uk (Malc Arnold)  wrote on 27.02.96 in <[🔎] m0trVp3-0000WYC@thing.demon.co.uk>:

> Karl M. Hegbloom" <karlheg@bittersweet.or.us> wrote:

> >  There must be a historical reason for the name a.out.  I wonder what
> > it is?  Who can we ask?
>
> I'll give it a try.  Way back in the mists of antiquity (1975) there
> was V7 Unix (and before that V1 through V6 of course).  The format of
> a file that the system could execute was called "a.out".  So it made
> sense to call the default linker output file "a.out", since it was
> an a.out file!

No, I'm sure it's the other way around.

I'm not certain where the "a" from a.out came from; the .out is somewhat  
obvious, of course. Anyway, it's the default output name for the linker  
(ld).

And once people began talking about file formats, naturally, they named  
the format used there "a.out format", just as the format used in a certain  
excuse for an OS is usually named ".EXE format".

(An important difference: object files in Un*x tend to use the same format  
as executables; object files in the unspeakable OS tend to use a  
completely different ".OBJ format".)

MfG Kai